Boosting execution priority of shopsite cgi's?

[ryan@ddm]

Using SS Pro 8.1.2 in a Solaris/Sparc environment. I'd like to speed up execution of my shopsite CGI's - right now they all run with the default nice of 0, just like the web server processes, mail server processes, etc.

Is there a way to specify a lower (i.e. higher priority) nice number for the SS cgi's everytime they run?

[robm]

Since the ShopSite cgi's are called from the webserver, they will run with the nice value of the webserver. You could boost the nice value for the webserver, which in turn would boost the nice value for the CGI's that get spawned by the parent webserver process (if your nice settings flow down to the children).

You can renice running processes, but I do not know of a way to have only certain web spawned cgi's run at a higher priority than other web processes. I'm sure you could recompile your webserver to control this more closely, but that would be quite involved.

[ryan@ddm]

Blast - because that's just the result I wanted to avoid. I'd like to boost the priority of my backoffice SS operations above that of the dozen or so httpsd processes my apache webserver has active.

Maybe I should back the question up slightly.

The problem: certain SS operations after the 8.x upgrade are taking an ungodly long time, and sometimes do not run to completion / time out. These include such things as regenerations and syncs to a sister store using the SS multi-store sync module.

I'd like to speed things up. Any suggestions?

I'm on a Verio Solaris VPS V2, apache webserver.

[robm]

8.1 should have a speed increase if anything due to the improved SQLite database transition. You may want to check with your host to see if the VPS node you are on is overloaded in some fashion causing your site speed issues for cpu intensive operations such as regens / syncs.

[ryan@ddm]

Yes, 8.1x was a huge improvement over 8.0.x - I presume due to the SQLite 3 vs 2 issue.

Here's another example of how this issue briefly affected me:

SS still has bugs in their item sort on pages code. For example, if I have a product named aa111 assigned to page 1 and 2, and then I copy product aa111 to create product b111, and assign bb111 to pages 1 and 2, product bb111 is not properly inserted. It should show up on the page after aa111 but before cc111, dd111, etc - but it does not. It is inserted at the end of the page, unsorted - regardless of the sort settings of the page (ascending, descending, etc).

However, if you then edit the page in question by clicking 'edit layout', make no changes, and simply click 'save' at the bottom, a proper resort is triggered and the page is properly sorted at the next publish.

What does this mean to me, functionally? From 6.0.1 and up through the present version, I often created a new product which would be assigned to 20+ pages. Before I published, I needed to get those pages properly sorted to avoid this new product appearing at the bottom. The time-saving solution? Simply highlight all pages, click 'edit layout', and scroll past all the page info and hit 'save' at the bottom. All pages are now forced into a resort at the next publish.

When SS made the change to SQLite 2, I could no longer highlight all 100+ pages of my store and click 'edit layout'. If I highlighted more than three or so, the operation would time out and I got a blank white page in return. With the move to SQLite 3, this time-out issue has been resolved and my quick solution to address SS's flawed item insertion/sort on pages is now available to me again. Woohoo

</tangent>

I'll check with my host to see if there are any load problems on my node. Thanks!