[SPTUsers] SPT performance, "sticky searches"

[will.sexton at duke.edu]

Perkins Library at Duke University recently debuted a reimplementation of
our DW3 project, accomplished by migrating data from static web pages into
the Scout Portal Toolkit.  The reimplementation is here:

http://www.lib.duke.edu/dw3/

While we were building the DW3 database in SPT on a development server,
performance was fine, and the domain specialists had no problem with our
installation.  However, once we'd moved the installation to our production
web server, we noticed a considerable drop-off in performance.  In
particular, the process of adding new records and updating existing
records with the Metadata Tool has become prohibitively slow.  The
librarian who's maintaining the db tried unsuccessfully to revise a record
and got this time-out message:

Fatal error: Maximum execution time of 30 seconds exceeded in
/WWW/htdocs/dw3/include/SPT--Recommender.php on line 426

I understand that this issue may be related to SPT's having to share
resources with a busy production web server (Apache, fwiw).  I'm wondering
if anyone else has tried to run SPT in such an environment and faced
similar problems?  Are users generally running their installations on web
servers dedicated to SPT?  And can anyone recommend optimizations for
performance?

There's a second issue, reported by the same librarian, and I'm going to
quote her note on this:

In the metadata tool the search isn't always 'sticky'. I've lately been
doing a search for any with the release flag 'not ok for viewing,' which
nets about 300 records and when I click 'next 20 results' my results sets
expanded to this: Results 21 - 40 of 2435. It seems sticky in the public
interface though, and works in the metadata tool if I do a search for
words in the description. It is also sticky if you do another
dropdown-only search, like domain. So maybe this is just a strange case.

/quote

Any help/thoughts appreciated!

Will
--
Will Sexton / Metadata Architect * Research & Content Development
Perkins Library * Duke University / http://www.duke.edu/~wsexton/