After doing all the tuning I knew how to do — messing with httpd.conf and php.ini — I was still seeing ridiculous page load times for dynamic content here. The system didn’t seem to be IO-bound or memory-bound anymore: it looked like the CPU was now the bottleneck. At 700 MHz, it’s not exactly modern. To test that, I backed up the database and restored it to my G3-upgraded-to-G4 (a scorching 550MHz box) and pointed the database queries at it: dramatic improvements ensued. Page load times are way down (my worst case scenario — loading my biggest archive page — used to take several minutes, now down to 90 seconds) and that’s what I hoped for. Perhaps the Apple-supplied binary of MySQL running is optimized for their hardware in ways I didn’t know about on FreeBSD.
And I have cleaned up a lot of stuff on the pages, turned text link menus into dropdowns, and generally tried to polish up the brightwork.
Now playing: Iron Man by The Cardigans from the album “First Band On The Moon”