Dev image performance is 10x slower than prod

[sobkulir]

Description

I'm new to CraftCMS and inherited a website for maintanence. As the first step, I've tried to setup a dev and prod Docker environments. However, there seems to be a ~10x performance penalty when using craftcms/nginx:7.4-dev as base image compared to craftcms/nginx:7.4. I'm setting devMode: false.

I can see two problems:

• Everything is slower by a factor of ~10
• Rendering _layouts/components/alerts seems to be the bottleneck

Using craftcms/nginx:7.4 (loading admin/dashboard takes under 500ms)

Using craftcms/nginx:7.4-dev (loading admin/dashboard takes under 5000ms)

Steps to reproduce

Additional info

• Craft version: Craft Pro 3.7.63.1
• PHP version: 7.4.33
• Database driver & version: MySQL 8.0.32
• Plugins & versions:
  • Control Panel CSS 2.4.0
  • Excerptify 1.0.1
  • Freeform 3.13.22.1
  • Mailchimp Subscribe 3.1.1.1
  • Navigation 1.4.31
  • Neo 2.13.16
  • Opening Hours 1.0.0
  • Redactor 2.10.11
  • Redactor Custom Styles 3.0.4
  • Redirect Manager 1.1.1
  • SS Entry Importer 1.0.3
  • Super Table 2.7.4

[thijskaspers]

Not 100% sure, but this could be because PHP opcache is disabled for the dev environment.

We use the prod Docker image for development, and set this ENV PHP_OPCACHE_VALIDATE_TIMESTAMPS=1;. It still has opcache enabled, but it checks timestamps for changes in PHP files to clear te cache. Hope that also helps in your case.

[timkelty]

I suspect @thijskaspers is right. It sounds like others have had luck with opcache enabled in dev, with opcache.validate_timestamps=1.

@thijskaspers any reservations about making this default for our dev image?

Related: #8

[sobkulir]

Thank you! Using prod image with ENV PHP_OPCACHE_VALIDATE_TIMESTAMPS=1 in the Dockerfile seems to work great.