Slow connections
I recently migrated to a VPS server, due to my launching of a fairly resource intensive website. I figured guaranteed CPU and RAM would be a far better solution, over a shared account with its luck-of-the-draw CPU access.
However, you can imagine my dissapointment when my scripts actually ran slower on the new VPS account. And not just a little slower, but on average 50% slower. Ouch.
After much work, I narrowed the problem down to an fSockOpen PHP command. So, the good news is that it is not a CPU or RAM limitation - the VPS server is working fine. The bad news is that I have no idea how to improove my socket connection time.I am making several connections to Amazon's web services. Most of the time, these connections take 0.3 seconds to perform. However, maybe once every five times, the connection takes 3-5 seconds. This does not include reading the XML back from Amazon - this is just opening the connection.
So, my question to all you server optimizing masters is: what would cause this? I am 99% sure Amazon is not to blaim - mostly because I did not have this problem before migrating to the new VPS server.
Any suggestions on how I could speed things up? Are there some tweaks I can make to the box (it's linux w/ DA, btw). Should I blaim the network the server is on? Any thoughts or suggestions would be eternally appreciated.
