Thread

I’ve been trying to optimize my EE site with all the recommendations from the documentation and these forums. I have a load balanced server and have all the relevant caching enabled. I rebuilt the page in Codeigniter to compare the speed of the page. The CI page queries the EE database. The EE page with caching enabled takes almost 5 times the time to render as the same page in Codeigniter with no caching. I’ve tested the site using Seige.

Siege test results:

EE: .23 seconds per transaction
CI: .05 seconds per transaction

Is there anything else I can do to reduce the EE overhead?

Thanks.

not all caching is beneficial.  you might want to perform a battery of tests with different caching enabled to see what results in the best performance.

without knowing what you’re doing on the page/in the templates, it’s going to be difficult to point to specific things that might be slowing you down.

I just using template caching at the moment. I’m using 3 tags for dynamic info.

1. Categories: to build the menu
2. Category header: for the title of the page
3. Entries: for the entries in that category

I’ve also tested a blank template. The siege test results for a blank template is .16 seconds per transaction.

make sure you’re disabling everything you can in each of the tags.

If you’ve not already done so turn on template debugging and sql queries (in preferences) - this should give you a good starting point to see what else EE is up to.

Thanks for the tips on disabling the tags and debugging prefs. I was able to get the transactions down to .15 seconds. It still looks like a majority of the of time takes place outside the templates and queries though. Out of the .15 seconds, only .05 was spent on queries and rendering the template. What else is the system doing to take up the .1 second? Thanks again.

there’s a good bit of file I/O as EE has to go read in a lot of core files/modules/etc to build the various objects EE uses to process everything.  definitely more than you really need if you were going to roll your own solution, but that’s the price you pay for flexibility and a one-tool-fits-most solution.