Hi all

I am at NY dev conf, where I have been collared by Martin and Chris from Rochen, our hosts for this site, with an abuse ticket. This site is frequently using 60-130% of CPU, and we're on shared hosting.

Somewhat alarming!

Anyway, to keep the site on air, I've had to do some radical performance work...

Here are the tips that Martin shared with me:

* SOBI2 may be a problem

* Kunena IS a problem (I recently replaced the Kunena native template with the 'default' Kunena template, as the one I was using, even though supplied with the product, is apparently not endorsed for use as it has errors)

* Permissions were wrong on some files in the account (Folders should be 755, files 644). This didnt affect performance but obviously compromises security

* Check the web site performance grader at joomlaperformance.com for where the site is under-performing
[The site is very heavy - CSS, HTML, JS, images]

* Upgrade Kunena from 1.5.5 to the lastest, 1.5.7 [I upgraded to 1.5.5 only a coupla weeks ago]. Note btw that J1.6 has an upgrade utility that flags upgrades due on Joomla and any installed extensions. Sweet!

* Replace Kunena with PHPBB for performance reasons. Kunena do mention poor performance as an issue on their own forum.

* Split this site off on to its own hosting account (for legacy reasons it shares)

* Delete an old copy of Melbourne Joomladay 2008 which is running on J1.0.13, because it's a security hazard

* Deny the two biggest users - Russian trawling sites - by denying the two IP addresses. SHould also reduce spam Russian member signups!

* Replace Joomla native SEF with an SEF extension. For reasons unknown (a bug in native SEF URLs) the forum link is different depending on which page you are on when you go to the forum. This has a huge drag on page refreshes. I believe it's a known bug, although if so, why isnt it fixed by now? I had this on another site a year ago.

* Turn on system caching. I re-read Andrew Eddie's notes on J1.5 caching here: www.theartofjoomla.com/joomla-caching-explained.html as a refresher, but in the first place I turned on the system caching plugin. Because of the forum link issue above, I blew about 200Mb of caching space right off the bat. Had to turn it off in the end when I ran out of disk space. Instead then I turned on caching in Global Config, and that worked really well at reducing CPU load

* RSS feed

Conclusion:
- I replaced the heavy ja_purity template with rt_afterburner, which took down HTML and CSS and images load
- I turned off Allvideos plugin (where is it used on this site?) and that saved 60k of JS
- I turned on Global Config system caching, at 15 mintues cache. Instead of caching several Mb per page(!) it's down to caching about 70 or 80k
- Blocking Russian IPs - that was a lot of wasted traffic/load
- Havent fixed the SEF URLs yet, nor the PHPBB, nor the Kunena upgrade, nor SOBI2
- Deleted Melbourne site and fixed permissions (not performance issues)

Because Martin ran through all this with me at hyperspeed, I did not have the opportunity to record all the stats before he/I made the changes, but see for yourself the figures now on Performance Grader:
www.joomlaperformance.com

I am going to attach some 'before' and 'after' statistics though.

The 'after' figures only include the following changes:
- Turn on Global config system caching
- replace ja_purity with rt_afterburner
- turn off Allvideos system and content plugins

OK, dont know why I cant attach an image.

Here is the before image:
www.joomladay.org.au/images/stories/performance_before.png

and the after image:
www.joomladay.org.au/images/stories/performance_after.png

So basically I made a couple of small changes and saved a massive amount in load-speed and above all number of files loaded. Look at the images - amazing results!

HTTP requests - down from 124 to 9
Page load - down from 9.4 to 2.2
Images - 107 down to just 3
Total load size from 302k to 41k

Well done Dex - I did a performance review of the joomlaperformace site (out of curiosity) - interesting results (attached)

that's very amusing!
if slightly sad.
I'm glad we are now doing a little better, and our hosting account is no longer in peril

Hey Dex,

Nice work on the reoptimisation. You know I love this stuff.

Did you try Rok GZip as well on this site since it is a Rok template?

It will get the CSS reducing the number of CSS files down to one, but test it as it sometimes doesn't workt hat well.

Peter

Anyone know anything about this?
I was going to try it out, but my hosting does not have mod_deflate.

www.yireo.com/tutorials/joomla-administr...mla-with-mod-deflate

I have on my server zlib.inflate, zlib.deflate
and the php info doesn't show gzip but if I tick the gzip box in admin then check at www.whatsmyip.org

I get www.yourcomputersolution.com.au is gzipped

Original Size: 11.37 KB
Gzipped Size: 3.67 KB
Data Savings: 67.72%

So not sure why this guy goes on about modifying the .htaccess file - that tick box works on my server (which is a VPS)

Cheers
Ian

This whole issue of site speed is reminding me so much of the "old days" when site building in a minamalist manner was regarded as critical. There were all sorts of tips and tricks one could use to increase speed to serve sites on dial up.

The one I remember most was that we used to load all the images on the index.html page very last in the code in 1px x 1px sizes. That way, by the time the visitor had read the first page, the images for the site had been cached and could be seen immediately...

My how things have changed with broadband and cable. Speed seems to have been forgotten. But now it seems that the issue has been raised again by Google itself and it would appear that they may start even rewarding sites with higher rankings using speed of load as but another factor in the algorithm.

They say history repeats itself. You just have to be around long enough to see it happen.. LOL.

Cheers all and Merry Xmas from Wedderburn!

Ric

I'm optimising a site www.yws.com.au and using the plugin for Firefox YSlow it reported not all files were Gzipped. I checked this site and it too reports not all files are compressed.
I installed this plugin plug_phpspeedy-J1.5-0.1alpha3 and got it to do the compression (turning it off under Global Configuration) and now all files are reporting they are zipped.

Might be worth a try on this site?

Cheers
Ian