[colug-432] wanted: silent PC for ownCloud hosting

[Rob Stampfli]

On Sun, Mar 30, 2014 at 03:50:41PM -0400, Scott Merrill wrote:
> As I mentioned at last week's COLUG meeting, I currently have two
> instances of ownCloud running: one at Digital Ocean, and one at home on
> a PogoPlug.
> 
> My PogoPlug is great in terms of size, power consumption, and noise.
> Unfortunately, it sucks in terms of performance.  The single CPU in
> there lacks the oomph to provide ownCloud with any kind of
> responsiveness.

Scott, if I may offer another angle to this, have you tried running
a PHP bytecode cacher on your PogoPlug?  After I read your comments
above, I pulled down a copy of ownCloud to test on my PogoPlug and,
yes, it was pretty pokey.  Then I installed XCache, and while it's
still no barn-burner, I found it usable.  XCache is one of the PHP
accelerators that cache the PHP bytecode output so that it doesn't
have to be re-compiled at each invocation of the file.  I've used
eAccelerator in the past, but had trouble compiling it in the Arm
environment.  XCache compiled, installed, and seems to run fine with
ownCloud.  Unlike eAccelerator, though, it doesn't save the cached
code on disk, so it does have to recompile to rebuild its shared
memory cache after a reboot (or Apache restart), which slows things
down initially.  But, since you already have a PogoPlug, you might
want to give XCache a try and see if it speeds things up enough to
make the results acceptable to you.

Download link: http://xcache.lighttpd.net/pub/Releases/3.1.0/xcache-3.1.0.tar.gz
Official installation help: http://xcache.lighttpd.net/wiki/InstallFromSource
(Make sure you "apt-get install php5-dev" before you begin.)

Rob