[rt-users] Slow ticket open - how to improve performance?

[Adolfo Santiago]

Opening tickets can sometimes take a long time (15-20 seconds).  Ours is a
brand new installation (just entered the second week), we only have two
users, and less than 400 tickets.

What can we do?  We've noticed that tickets with longer histories take
longer to come up (makes sense), but these histories are usually composed of
simple things like status changes, ownership changes, and short messages or
comments.

I've gone over the archives and implemented as many of the improvements I
found (MySQL memory settings, database indexes, etc).  Here are the indexes
I created:

1.  alter table TicketCustomFieldValues add index (Ticket);
2.  create index CacheMemId on CachedGroupMembers(MemberId);
3.  create index CacheGrouID on CachedGroupMembers (GroupId);
4.  create index CacheMemIdGrouId on CachedGroupMembers(MemberId,GroupId);
5.  create index PrincipalType on Principals(PrincipalType);
6.  create index CustomField on TicketCustomFieldValues(CustomField);
7.  create index Domain on Groups(domain);
8.  create index Instance on Groups(instance);

The above are in addition to the indexes the RT came with "out of the box".

Our hardware and software set up is:

1.  RT 3.0.8
2.  Apache 1.3.29 using mod_perl (all compiled with the latest source as of
2/1/2004)
3.  MySQL 3.23.58  (compiled with the latest source as of 2/1/2004)
4.  Athlon 800 Mhz, 256 Meg RAM
5.  100 Mbit LAN
6.  Caldera OpenLinux 3.11 (Linux kernel v2.4.13).

What are we missing?  How can we improve?  Is the hardware not enough?
Should we add more memory? Here's the output of the "free" command:

             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:        255448     243956      11492         12       2652      87184
-/+ buffers/cache:     154120     101328
Swap:       208836     136640      72196

Are we too constrained?

Any help would be much, much appreciated.

Thanks!

Chago