Hi Everyone

We have just launched www.safari.co.uk, and its working really nice - apart from the speed. We really need to improve page load times and optimise the image library.

Can anyone sign post me to ideas / guidelines. I think there is a lot of performance to be gained in the cache of cropped images that could be served as static image instead of having to pass through the GD library everytime (or is this already happening?).

Thanks in advance for any pointers!

Lawrence

Hi,

Looks like a brochureware site - so http://doc.silverstripe.org/framework/en/reference/staticpublisher - could be a huge win.

If you want to do a partial cache...
http://doc.silverstripe.org/framework/en/reference/templates#partial-caching
http://doc.silverstripe.org/framework/en/reference/templates#calling-templates-from-php-code

Then you have the more complicated server setup... APC, memcache, varnish (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varnish_(software)).

Lastly, of course is analysing your site with something like kcachegrind and improving the code you have added :)

Images don't get passed through the GD library every time, only when they are first resized. It then checks if a resized image exists and serves it if it does.

I agree with Swaiba - partial caching & static publishing help a lot, partial caching alone recently saved us about 30% on loading times.

Thanks for this. Also applied these htaccess rules which have helped a lot...

<IfModule mod_expires.c>
  ExpiresActive On
  ExpiresByType text/html "access plus 7 day"
  ExpiresByType text/js "access plus 7 day"
  ExpiresByType image/gif "access plus 7 day"
  ExpiresByType image/png "access plus 7 day"
  ExpiresByType image/jpg "access plus 7 day"
  ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access plus 7 day"
  ExpiresByType image/ico "access plus 7 day"
  ExpiresByType text/css "access plus 7 day"
  ExpiresByType text/javascript "access plus 7 day"
  ExpiresByType application/x-javascript "access plus 7 day"
</IfModule>

<IfModule mod_deflate.c>
  SetOutputFilter DEFLATE
  BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html
  BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4\.0[678] no-gzip
  BrowserMatch \bMSIE !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html
  # Don't compress images, movies or zip files
  SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI \.(?:gif|jpe?g|png)$ no-gzip dont-vary
  SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI \.(?:exe|t?gz|zip|bz2|sit|rar)$ no-gzip dont-vary
  SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI \.(?:avi|mov|mp3|mp4|rm|flv|swf|mp?g)$ no-gzip dont-vary
  <IfModule mod_headers.c>
    # properly handle requests coming from behind proxies
    Header append Vary User-Agent
  </IfModule>
</IfModule>

Will work on the partial cache soon, just need to work out what elements can be cached like that. Also setting up a varnish server as a test.

Thanks again

html5boilerplate.com has a nice .htaccess file too.

Edit: https://github.com/h5bp/html5-boilerplate/blob/master/.htaccess

If you missed it, there is also a blog post about performance. I use that as guide for improving performance on sites:
http://www.silverstripe.org/how-to-improve-website-performance/

And then i use http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/ to see where i should improve, and ofcourse also the showqueries=1 url param onsite.