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<br>
Hey all,<br>
<br>
What are the advantages of running with UTF-8 on an english language
site? The main reason I ask is that we're seeing truly significant
performance hits on 5.7.2 with UTF enabled vs disabled.<br>
<br>
Our test: <br>
<ol>
<li>we run our entire system in the Amazon Compute Cloud</li>
<li>The main production IC layer server is configured as a CPU-heavy
machine (2.5 cores at 2.5GHz each)</li>
<li>Some of the pages, especially those with nested loops are
atrocious. The same code on one of our older servers running 5.4 runs a
factor of 10x faster.</li>
<li>For testing purposes and to keep the same environment, I booted a
new instance of the exact same server as the production server. It uses
the exact same DB backend server, the catalogs were cloned, mounted on
the new test server and the only configuration changes were to the
server URL in the catalogs and the apache config.</li>
<li>UTF-8 was disabled on the new test server through
MINIVEND_DISABLE_UTF8=1 and setting all the directives for UTF-8 in the
global and catalog configs to be 0 or commented out.</li>
<li>The exact same page was loaded on the production system and the
new test system. It's a complex page that produces a financial summary
for a race event, broken down by entries, classes and produces some
nice graphs. This page (and some of our others) use multiple subloops,
which I know introduces performance issues.<br>
</li>
<li>Test system (no UTF-8): 5 seconds, Production system (UTF-8): 49
seconds<br>
</li>
</ol>
<br>
As you can see, 5 seconds vs 49 seconds is significant and I'm sure you
appreciate that it's the difference between a quietly happy customer
and a wildly dissatisfied one. So we'll be disabling UTF-8 on the
production server today in time for this weekend's race events. <br>
<br>
Perl 5.10.0<br>
Encode 2.39<br>
IC 5.7.2<br>
<br>
To help us make a good decision going forward can someone explain the
relative merits of UTF-8 in an english-only site? Alternately, any
updates into how to fix the horrible slowness of the UTF-8 enabled
site, preferably through config changes or updates rather than by
rewriting all the loops ;)<br>
<br>
Thanks,<br>
<br>
Chris.<br>
<br>
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