Thread

I’ve just completed my third Expression Engine integration and for some reason this site is running incredibly slowly. I’ve turned on template debugging:

http://demo2.oi-digital.com/index.php/

I’ve tried repairing and optimising my database tables but it’s still running terribly slow.

Any ideas?

It’s running on a Windows dedicated server with IIS 6.0.

Thanks,

Rich

tr309-

Nice site.  Just a thought, since you didn’t mention it, have you used the disable property in your entries to eliminate any excess processing?

Geoff

..and have you experimented with caching?

Otherwise speed issues are sometimes related to how the site was constructed behind the scenes…look to reduce number of tags, embedded templates etc if possible…

Thanks Geoff. I’ll look into the disable property. And thanks Boyink! I will have a look into caching and the other things you’ve mentioned above.

The site existed in a static form prior to the EE integration and it ran fine then. It was hosted on another server however, so that might be a factor. I have created a number of embeds - I thought this was a good thing to do to keep things neat and tidy and easily maintainable?

Thanks,

Rich

Rich,

It’s possible as you say that it could be the server - are you on a shared server with other sites, or is it on your own dedicated server?

The reason I ask if that if you were able to give us addresses for other websites on the same server, we could work out from that if it’s just your site or not…

Cheers!
Steve.

Well the funny thing is, it is a dedicated server (Windows 2k3 with IIS6.0) and many of the PHP sites running on it seem to underperform whereas the ASP sites on the same server seem to be super-fast. I know this is coming out of the topic of ExpressionEngine but does anyone know of any reason for PHP to run slowly on IIS6.0? I have maintained a dedicated server before on the same spec and PHP sites were fine.

Puzzled!

Rich

Unfortunately I have little experience of Windows servers, but I’m sure there will be knowledgeable people that could point you in the right direction.

Good luck!
Cheers,
Steve.

Embeds = good.  Usually.  But like anything good they can also be overused.  I’ve logged into some EE installs that just had me shaking my head…;)

But based on the comments so far I’d be looking at the server environments first.

I don’t do IIS, as a rule, but perhaps this PHP bug report might be useful: http://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=28524

Also, you’ll want to check to make sure EE has read, write, and modify access to all the files it needs, including your cache directories.  Permissions on Windows are a little screwy, so it’s easy to have something set not quite right.  The short and easy answer though is to move to a *nix server.  It’s just not a terribly good platform for PHP/MySQL applications for a number of reasons, speed being just one.

You could also move the CSS to a static file on the server, instead of dynamic as a template.
See a screenshot of safari develop-menu and firefox-firebug network profiling. (attached)
(these results are a bit skewed, because i’m currently working on an old G4)

GDmac’s point is valid, at least on a Windows server, as the headers EE uses to allow the browser to cache CSS requests will not work in that environment.  Another point against running PHP apps on IIS, you see.

Thanks all for your help and suggestions. There are some really useful tips posted here.

After some experimentation it looks like a PHP-running-on-Windows issue. It was necessary to go IIS/Windows because of the need for ASP.Net applications (which funnily enough run lightning fast!). I personally would have preferred a Linux-based server.

I created a simple test.php which did nothing but

<?php print "TEST"; ?>

. The poor page load time was apparent on the above domain so I tried another domain/site on the server - same again. And then finally tried the same test.php file on one of my Linux servers and as expected the page finished loading before I could blink.

Richard

Richard-

Thanks for reporting your findings.  Good to know.  Are you going to move the site, then?

Probably not related to the slowdown in rendering and delivery (Windows) but I did find a few dozen validation errors in the HTML, and an error on font-color in the CSS.