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I’ve been looking to speed up my home page and asked for some tips regarding that.  It was suggested that I use the channel disable parameters.  I am also using template caching set to 24 hours, so the page is effectively static and gets refreshed once a day.  My question is by doing this am I effectively making any optimization of the channel tags unimportant in the sense that the channel tags will only get run once each day anyway?

Dynamic Channel Query Caching

This feature is found under Admin > Channel Administration > Global Preferences. This feature will improve the speed at which the {exp:channel:entries} tag is rendered by caching queries that are normally executed dynamically. This option cannot be used for all people, though.

Enable this feature only if you do not use future entries, expiring entries, or random entries.

Source: EE Caching

http://www2.grist.org/misc/Performance_Guidelines.pdf

I’ve also read, but can’t immediately find the source, that template caches should be at 10 minutes max. IIRC it was Nevin of EngineHosting who suggested this.

Michael, this quote from Nevin intrigued, and so I tracked it down.

What I found is an entirely interesting and exceptionally valuable thread—moved to General Discussion of all things by a moderator, and only discoverable in the Archived forum. Thank goodness we still have that.

http://ellislab.com/forums/viewthread/137087/

There are also several linked documents of high value for performance, not all of which I’ve seen before.

In very brief summary, you can find out why add-ons like CE Cache and several of the Solspace ones are out there; not always for reasons you might suspect, as in the case of Super Search.

Further, Paul Burdick, who designed a lot of ExpressionEngine itself and was employed later for SolSpace on performance matters specifically, is out there on Twitter, and I think also still in some connection with Solspace.

On the matter of not caching templates from Nevin, my take is that the issue comes with larger sites, and perhaps especially with embed templates. EE Caching apparently occurs per browser URL, rather than per template as it may seem from its setup—likely it is whether any cache-marked templates are included that determines to cache a given URL.

Thus if you mark an embed, and it is used multiple places, you use up one cache entry for each of those places (urls) towards the limit you’ve set, or the system limit of 1000 cache entries.

On a small site, I’ve measured and found that straightforwardly caching things like embeds gives big speed advantages, and doesn’t run into the limits; thus a simple-minded approach apparently works, which is a bonus for many EE sites.

On a large site…well, read the thread. You will come out educated, and with a great set of information, links, and evident persons, to go farther.

Stunning stuff, which shows what the EE community has been like.

It makes me think there should be an area of the Ellis sites where such gems are very securely collected and visible—and whether they originate in the ‘ordinary’ forums or not, looking ahead to the enterprise support. Also that other policies considered going forward, so that everything deeply informational isn’t bogged down, or transformed into pay-high-to-be-made-aware-at-all.

I think the arguments for this would include that persons need a continuous path to move from self-support towards and into recognizing the time had come for highly paid consultancy; and that certain flavors of working community can generate very surprisingly valuable contributions, which were also not ever expected.

Individuals do good work, and that is after all how the performance teams, CausingEffect, and Solspace (with this hat on at least) got started. That’s on the performance front: think how many other highly appreciated and highly capable products and services have emerged in the rest of the arena, making EE what it now is.

Regards, and off soap box, but it seems an important one,
Clive

Hi welshartnow,

As you can see, there has been a lot of discussion on ExpressionEngine performance!

In the post the narration links to, Nevin says not to use caching unless you have a real need to.

When it comes to performance tuning ExpressionEngine, my suggestion is to use what works best for your environment.

Definitely read the resources that have been linked to from here.

Cheers,

Well, going back to what welshartnow originally asked, I think the answer is that even though you cache, and this does improve matters almost all the time, keeping your templates reasonably efficient is always a performance help.

It may be just for that one person who checks the site and has to wait for the caches to be rebuilt, but it can also have an effect for anything in your site that isn’t actually cached or cacheable.

Keeping the balance in mind, and the help of the caching, should keep you from getting too intense about small gains.

As far as what Nevin Lyne said, I’m sure he’ll correct me if this isn’t right, from a number of fine experiences talking with im, but I think we have to be careful to interpret his words, in the context of that potent thread referenced above, which was on large and heavy traffic site performance.

I observe that ordinary EE template caching means going from over a second per page minimum, and quite a few seconds under shared server load, to a quarter to a third of a second per page typical, and seldom over one second per page even under that high load situation. It’s a big win, and keeps your site from having that sluggish feeling.

It also keeps your site from overly contributing to server load, another important thing to consider.

I can also well understand what Nevin is talking about, when you have many different page urls and high traffic. In that case simple template caching can become inefficient. You then need to go to more sophisticated caching methods, as discussed.

Many people here will be in the first case, and benefit from EE’s straightforward template caching. Those who aren’t, will know it, and find the resources and tools to help.

As I see matters, anyway.

Regards to each,
Clive