Thread

I was wondering if someone could shed some light on EE performance and add-ons, how they work, and how to optimize a site.

When using the template debugger, I have noticed many calls to add-ons (looks like once for each entry generated by channel:entries tag), even add-ons I am not using on the site, but have installed as a module for later use, such as P&T Matrix and Solspace favorites tag. Do all installed add-ons get called for each page load, even if they’re not in use?

I keep seeing my memory usage for my site at around 30MB each page refresh and .25seconds load time. Nothing really changed after changing all my embeds to snippets, and getting rid of advanced conditionals and using switchee instead. I have used the disable tag on all my channel:entries tags.

I am currently not caching any pages because I’m in development, and plan to do so. I have a few entries ordering entries randomly, so I cannot use caching on those pages, correct? On all other pages, should I use template or tag caching?

Anyone have advice on what I can do to further reduce the page load speed and memory usage?

There’s a lot you can do to optimise EE, have you seen the two wiki entries…

http://expressionengine.com/wiki/Optimize_EE
http://expressionengine.com/wiki/Reduce_Queries

Of course caching templates has a dramatic effect on page load times, try it even when you’re developing so you can get an idea!

Hi anthonycollini,

In addition to the suggestions Rob makes, there is a new caching/performance add-on,CE Cache. It appears to offer fine-grained control over caching.

Since performance tuning is outside the scope of support, everything is technically working correctly for you, I’m going to move this into Community Help to keep the discussion going.

Thanks!

We had a huge stream of traffic to an announcement on a recently launched site and turned to Solspace’s Static Page Caching add-on.  We used it for the entries that were receiving the majority of the incoming traffic and it cured our memory issues immediately. Probably not the best choice for every site, but if you’re seeing high volume on largely static pages, it’s a good option.