phpweather-devel

Speed question -- why are some servers slower than others?

[Michael G. <ph...@mg...>]

First of all, let me say thanks to the developers. This is a cool tool. And
as a beginning PHP coder, I was thrilled with how quickly I could get it al=
l
to work.

But here=B9s my question. I=B9ve encountered BIG speed differences depending on
the server I=B9m using. On my local machine running Apache on Mac OS X
(Jaguar), the speed test page runs 200-300 ms per METAR. That=B9s also true o=
f
one of the web hosting services I use (running a Windows 2000 server).
Unfortunately, on the host I intend to use for this project (running Apache
on Linux), it takes forever =8B over 10 seconds per METAR. The page I=B9m tryin=
g
to host there (which displays temperatures for eight locations) takes over =
a
minute to load. Unacceptable, obviously.

Perhaps someone can suggest what gives here. Is the slow service running a
crappy PHP parser or is its connection to the METAR site slow for some
reason? Or is it something else? I have not changed the default configs, no=
r
have I (yet) cached the data to a database.

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks again for this wonderful piece of software.

m=20

P.S. -- Apologies to the moderator for the earlier post; I hadn=B9t realized
you needed to subscribe first!

Re: Speed question -- why are some servers slower than others?

[Martin G. <gim...@gi...>]

Michael Gilman <ph...@mg...> writes:

> First of all, let me say thanks to the developers. This is a cool
> tool. And as a beginning PHP coder, I was thrilled with how quickly
> I could get it all to work.

Thanks a lot! It's great to get feedback like that :-)

> Perhaps someone can suggest what gives here. Is the slow service
> running a crappy PHP parser or is its connection to the METAR site
> slow for some reason? Or is it something else? I have not changed
> the default configs, nor have I (yet) cached the data to a database.
>
> Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

I'm sorry about the late reply --- I'm having my exams right now, and
then I also don't have a real answer for you... But I can always guess
:-) I don't think it has anything to do with the PHP parser, I would
think that it's a network problem.

PhpWeather doesn't do anything fancy with the connection. It either
uses the built-in file() function (for non-proxy connections) or
fsockopen() function (for proxy-connections) to connect. You could
experiment a little with using file() on other sites --- the server at
the NWS has been slow at several occasions.

Also, the bandwidth of the server running PhpWeather obviously matter,
so if your servers have different bandwidth, then that could explain
the speed differences you're seeing.

> P.S. -- Apologies to the moderator for the earlier post; I hadn=B9t
> realized you needed to subscribe first!

No problem! It's actually nice to see a legitimate post in the filter
once in a while ;-)

--=20
Martin Geisler                       My GnuPG Key: 0xF7F6B57B

See http://gimpster.com/ and http://phpweather.net/ for:
PHP Weather =3D> Shows the current weather on your webpage and
PHP Shell   =3D> A telnet-connection (almost :-) in a PHP page.