Performance

All About Speed - Part 1 (Bandwidth Demystified)

All about speed (well, not really) is the first of a multi part series devoted to website performance. Website performance is as important as content (if not more important)! Notice I said performance, not speed. There is a difference, and an important one! Speed is just one measure of performance. In this first part, we will discuss the difference between speed and performance, and the basic steps that can be taken to maximize both.

Improving Joomla's Queries

About a month ago, I decided to truly see how efficient Joomla's SQL was... It turns out, it's PRETTY good, but can use some improvement. I logged all queries that were not using an index, then ran describe. I came up with a set of queries (adding indexes to tables) that appears to speed up Joomla by about 0.1 second (on the sites I was using to measure that, it's about 25% faster). I will be creating a directory for performance modifications (and others) for 3pd extensions, but I wanted to get this out!

NOTE: I hold no guarantee that these queries won't screw up your database, so BACKUP FIRST!!! ALSO, be sure to change jos_ to whatever prefix you are using... So, lets get to it...

So, you want to speed up Joomla?

While Joomla is one of the most flexible and robust Content Management Systems available, it can suffer in the performance area. There are some common things that can be done to help speed your site up. While the best performance can be seen on a full dedicated server running Lighttpd (It's MUCH faster than Apache) and a local MySQL database, acceptable performance levels can be achieved with almost any hosting package. For some administrators, upgrading to a dedicated server might not be practical...