Slashdotting your P200 HOWTO

So I'm the Geek You Know for about six friends, and one of them needs a website. I volunteer my li'l server, no problem. But she wants something she can manage herself, and as she's not a geek that means something easy on the eyes and easy to use.

So I start looking at (can't use this phrase w/o gritting my teeth) content management systems, c/o Freshmeat and OpenSourceCMS.com (this site rocks). I've tried out two or three so far, and all have had the same results: my li'l server is dreadfully overworked.

It's a P200, 48MB of RAM, and it's fine at serving up static content: most of my site and my wife's site is just that, so it's not a problem most of the time. But start throwing some MySQL into the picture, and things slow down fast.

I'd settled, sort of, on Back-End as a likely contender; I liked its management pages, can't beat the street cred when CUPE uses it, there's an integrated gallery, and the installation went well. But when I tried it out...holy crap, it was slow: 10 seconds to throw up a page. Admittedly, better than the 30 seconds with some other packages, but still.

I figured it was time to move the database to the faster computer. I've got a Celeron, 450MHz, 384MB RAM, that I use for my desktop. Wasn't doing much besides 87 xterms and setiathome, so I figured out how to move it over there. Still slow. Well, decided to try some benchmarks. That's what separates us from the animals.

ab, against my own (static) site, shows 1000 requests being served, none dropped, concurrency 5, in 26 seconds. Against the Back-End demo site I set up, it timed out. I upped the timeout; same thing. In frustration I set concurrency to 500, set up iostat and top to watch on both the database and the web server (fancy!), and waited.

And waited.

After five minutes, the SSH session showing the stats on the P200 stopped. (Load on the Celeron and its disks barely registered, BTW.) I logged in via the KVM to see what was happening, and the answer is: not much. "eth0: card reports no resources", whole lotta processes being killed due to lack of memory, and fifteen minutes it is still chugging its way back to freedom. (Don't want to reboot and ruin that 60-day uptime...)

So: My questions to all of you are:

1. If it's not the CPU dedicated to the database that's the bottleneck, what is? Is it the PHP processing? Should I be moving the web server to the faster processor?
2. Anyone know a light -weight CMS system? Don't need a lot of bells and whistles; mostly this'll be a way of editing a mostly static site. Comments, polls, user journals...eh.

My thanks in advance for whatever help you can provide.

Original entry.