Performance Tips and Examples (tips in one place)

Permalink
HI there is lots of information about performance enhancements but i wondered if we can collect all the tips in one place ... make it easier for people to see.

Also links to large sites and what they do to make them quicker

for example
- use a cdn (akamai, cloudflare...)
- link to assets using absolute not programmatic links

spencerhudson
 
westhouseit replied on at Permalink Reply
That would be great!

The biggest performance boost I've found is simply using a better host. I see so many people using cheap shared hosting complaining about slow page loads.

I've now got my site down to about 500ms load times. Granted, the amount of the dynamic content is low, but I'm not using any opcode or proxy caches.
mesuva replied on at Permalink Reply
mesuva
I can't agree with this comment more.

Although it's always good to optimise a site and take advantage of caching options that might be available, server side compression, etc, if a server is old, slow and/or overloaded it's going to be hard to improve things past a point.

I've unfortunately had to deploy concrete5 to a few hosts (not of my choosing) where page render speed has been horrific. In cases where it's been 10-20 seconds to load pages I've always ended up finding out later that a server is overloaded or 5+ years old. I've then moved these sites elsewhere and found them to be run without any speed issues, after wasting too much time trying to speed things up.

I've even spent some time in the past writing a static caching wrapper, to completely bypass normal concrete5 processing. This did work well to speed up slower server, but the editing would still be painful and error prone. I'm finding it's less work to move a site than fight trying to work out why it's slow.

There are some great site optimisations that can be applied that minifies javascript/css/html and streamlines files ('Miser' comes to mind), but I also think it's often misunderstood how that speeds things up. That's great if your site is very resource heavy and it speeds up download times for users on slower connections (great), but it doesn't speed up the 'time to first byte' where the server is generating the html page in the first place.

Shared hosting is totally fine as long as you pick someone decent. I just get the impression that an 'unoptimised' concrete5 install on a decent host is always going to outperform a heavily optimised site on struggling server.

* Sorry for the rant, I'm not trying to discourage the idea of having a collection of optimisations, that's a great idea. I'm really only talking about the cases where people have sites that are almost non functional speed wise.