Performance tuning CakePHP application

Question

I just got this quite large CakePHP app (about 20k lines of code), which isn\'t very clean and there is no documentation at all. The app is running in production, but it has rea

Answer 1

I think you won't get around a little digging, I'm afraid. You will need to identify the bottleneck(s), at least the components that are causing the load. For example, massive accesses to poorly indexed mySQL tables can drive a server really crazy. That is a frequent reason for performance problems in my experience.

The really best thing to do would be to set up a debugging/profiling environment, but the process list of your server should already be able to give you a rough picture of who is causing such strain. Is it really the PHP processes, or is there any database activity?