Fine-Tuning OpenX For Performance

Lately I’ve made a post about installing OpenX to serve your own ads. Using OpenX (aka OpenAds) can be quite confusing at first so I’ll be making a video tutorial soon.

But before we go into using OpenX, there are a few things you can do to improve its performance. Otherwise OpenX can be quite resource-consuming.

OpenX Performance Tuning Tips

There are some parameters that will require write permission on /path/to/openx/var/www.yourdomain.com.conf.php.

Here are a few things I’ve found that make OpenX run smoother.

Disabling Automatic Maintenance Upon Delivery

Instead of performing maintenance tasks upon ad delivery, you should set a scheduled task to run hourly. Here’s the command line to run the maintenance task:

/path/to/php -f /path/to/openx/maintenance/maintenance.php

If you are using cPanel, here’s what the cron job should look like:

Once you’ve set up the cron job, you need to disable automatic maintenance. Log into your OpenX control panel and click on the Settings tab at the top. From the Main Settings tab, select the Administrator Settings item from the dropdown menu. Uncheck the following checkbox:

Hit the Save Changes button.

Disable Debug Logging

Again from the Settings tab, click on Main Settings and choose Debug Logging from the listbox. Uncheck the Enable Debug Logging checkbox.

Move Images Stored In The Database To A Directory

When you upload a new banner image, it will be stored in the database. To improve performance, move these images to a folder on your web server.

To do this automatically, click on the Settings tab and then on Maintenance. From the dropdown menu select Storage and click on Move images stored inside the database to a directory.

Test Different Invocation Methods

I’ve found out that I’ve had better performance using the local invocation method (PHP). The problem is that inserting the local invocation code in your PHP pages could sometime break your website. In this case I use the Javascript invocation script although it does not perform as much as PHP.

Upgrade To PHP5

If you’re still using PHP4, it’s time you consider upgrading to PHP5. OpenX offers better performance on PHP5. Chances are it will not be compatible with PHP4 in a near future. Read more about this here.

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