Hosting Requirements and Suggestions

On this page

1. Hosting requirements
2. Performance tuning
3. See also

Hosting requirements

Managing News is developed and tested on a typical Drupal server environment. If your system meets these requirements you should be able to run MN successfully:

1. Apache (with mod_rewrite for clean urls)
2. MySQL 5
3. PHP 5.2 (32M memory limit / 30+ second max execution time). See this page to increase your PHP memory limit

In addition, using a PHP opcode cache like xcache is highly recommended.

Performance tuning

Per default Managing News is configured to update 5 feeds per cron run. This number is low to ensure robust behavior on cron time even on slower servers.

With this setting, a cron run should not exceed ~ 32MB of memory usage and ~ 30 seconds of execution time.

As soon as your Managing News is subscribed to more than 30 feeds, this setting may not show the desired performance.

If you would like to improve the overall update frequency on feeds, follow these steps:

1. Allow Managing News to use more memory, set the memory limit to e. g. 128 or 256 M
2. Use drush http://drupal.org/project/drush for running cron. This eliminates the PHP execution time limit and uses less memory: myserver# drush cron.
3. Now you can up the number of feeds that are being processed per cron run in your settings.php file, which you can find in your /sites/default/ folder:
   

     // Set number of feeds to update per cron run, maximum number depending on
   // the configuration in 1 and the time between cron runs.
   $conf['feeds_schedule_num'] = 20;

4. Go to Administer > Reports > Dblog (admin/reports/dblog) and look for messages by MN Core: Make sure that Page execution time is within the period between cron runs and Peak memory usage does not exceed the setting defind in step 1.

As a general rule, more often and short cron runs are better. Tuning for around 20 feeds per update seems to be a good compromise. Keep in mind, that the exact numbers are going to depend a lot on the kinds of feeds your Managing News is aggregating: are they slow to fetch? Do they have may items? Do items on these feeds have large text bodies?

See also

Related pages

• Increase PHP memory limit

External resources

• Increase PHP memory limit - drupal.org
• How to create a custom php.ini file when nothing else works
• Drush - drupal.org