Migration from UML to XEN based VPS web hosting Boosts Performance for Web 2.0 PR Site

India (SANEPR.com) April 29, 2008 -- Small business marketing and news portal, PressReleasePoint.com, has significantly improved site performance and user experience by migrating from UML to XEN based virtualisation technology. Their recent move from shared hosting service to a virtual private server hosting service rented from Linode failed to deliver any significant site performance improvements. Various performance tuning excercises like PHP opcode caching, in memory caching of serialized PHP objects, MySQL optimisation, Apache congfiguration changes and squid caching improved site performance to some extent. Significant and immediate improvement in site performance was achieved only after migrating to XEN based VPS hosting plan "XENODE" from Linode.

"User-mode Linux is generally considered to provide lower performance than some competing technologies, such as Xen and OpenVZ. Future work in adding support for Virtualization Technology to UML may reduce this disadvantage. Often cited as a strength of Xen (a competing technology) is support for Thread Local Storage (TLS). This is now also supported in the latest UML kernels. Xen concentrates on virtualising the whole machine, and thus all systems running on a Xen machine are really virtual machines. In UML, the host machine is not virtualised in any way, and only guest systems are true virtual machines" - Wikipedia.

Growing number of small business marketing professionals, PR firms, reporters, editors, researchers and journalist using free press release services from PressReleasePoint will enjoy faster website performance and page loading time. Better hosting also means that users will get more website features and functions to help their business. Site has not seen any down time since migration to XEN. There is 100% improvement in site load time and page submit time after migration to XEN. Site traffic has doubled after migration to XEN. This shows their commitment to become a leading resource for media marketing and unique portal for business and technology news.


Powerful LAMP technology based open source content management server is used for their database driven free press release distribution website. Fedora 8 Core running on XEN virtualised private server is used for L(inux) part of the LAMP stack. Xen is a free software virtual machine monitor for IA-32, x86, x86-64, IA-64 and PowerPC 970 architectures. It allows several guest operating systems to be executed on the same computer hardware at the same time. A Xen system is structured with the Xen hypervisor as the lowest and most privileged layer.[1"> Above this layer are one or more guest operating systems, which the hypervisor schedules across the physical CPUs. The first guest operating system, called in Xen terminology "domain 0" (dom0), is booted automatically when the hypervisor boots and given special management privileges and direct access to the physical hardware. The system administrator logs into dom0 in order to start any further guest operating systems, called "domain U" (domU) in Xen terminology.

"Server load factor is the measure of CPU utilisation. Our server load factor while running on UML VPS is 7.0 or 8.0 during busy hours. This reduced to 0.25 to 0.30 immediately after migrating to XEN based VPS. Many thanks to Linode team who helped us with this significant improvement".

Unlike many free press release sites which revamped their website appearance to be buzzword compliant, PressReleasePoint.com is built to be a web2.0 site from day one. Site architecture derived from a leading open source content management solution can support heavy personalisation, customisation and latest web2.0 features from its core. Open source technology powering PressReleasePoint.com comes with inbuilt AJAX support which allows the site to effortlessly deliver rich internet experience for its users. Such rich set of features naturally puts heavy load on the database and operating system. Only superior VPS plans can handle such heavy CPU loads.


About PressReleasePoint:

PressReleasePoint is a small business public relations agency dedicated to press release writing and distribution services. PressReleasePoint.com is a free press release distribution website launched to help online marketers generate media visibility and maximize online publicity. Both online marketers and PR firms can submit free press release to PressReleasePoint.com to reach their target audience directly as well as through print media outlets, online media channels, blogs, search engines etc. Site attracts more than 2000 visitors per day. Multiple programs have been designed to attract 10,000 unique visitors per day. Site will be soon moved to Intel Xeon based multicore dedicated server.


Contacts:
Saravanan,
Webmaster,
PressReleasePoint,
044 22222656
Chennai, India
saravanan2@pressreleasepoint.com
http://www.pressreleasepoint.com/