Fotis, as you requested here is a post regarding the loading speed bottleneck I am having with my K2 based site, I have tried turning off plugins and components, reshuffling plugins around and enabling catalog mode for main categories, child categories etc but I am baffled.

 

Basically the site on an empty cache takes a few seconds to oad as expected, after this is is sub 1 second here, click to my main category page and it stays a few seconds which is still a little slow. Then you go into a sub category and the load slows right down, testing on webwait with an average 5 cycles shows:

 

Homepage - contains tons of modules, content articles and other goodies average= 2.10seconds

 

Child category page, perhaps 6 articles loading, not image intensive, average= 37.09seconds

 

The site in question is:

 

bikechatter.co.uk/index.php

 

Main category in its current guise is:

 

bikechatter.co.uk/articles.html

 

And finally a child category can be viewed at:

 

bikechatter.co.uk/articles/motorcycle-site-news.html

 

What is equally odd here though is that loading articles directly is as quick as expected so logically I have been looking at child categories being the issue.

 

One thing I have had a lot of problems with is the RSS feeds timing out or returning as html pages, I am guessing that this might be linked somehow. As you can probably see from the site there is a lot of content, most of it has been carefully optimised to keep loading times low but I just cannot figure where the hell this speed issue is coming from or how to counteract it - if you want a login creating please let me know - hopefully it is something you have seen before or an obvious issue others might get a fix for - I am at the end of my tether trying to figure the source.

 

Cheers

 

Leigh

 

 

 

As typically as it can be, I have rebuilt the cache directory, moved some categories out of a top level category and added the original K2.css file to my html overrides and it loads quickly again. Not sure how or why but I will keep an eye on it.

 

leigh :)

Thanks for getting back to me, the site is hosted on my private server along with a handful of much smaller client sites - nothing that really uses much in the way of resources, it is a decent spec machine for what it needs to do and rarely goes over 15% Ram and 1.5 cpu - except when I enable the Joomla cache plugin - then it goes berserk and spikes upwards of 50cpu, it seems to get in a cycle and wont recover without a server reboot so I try not to find the cause.

 

With this being a dedicated server would you say performance is lower than you would expect in server lag? I always find a lag of a couple of seconds prior to loading a page on this site but as a comparison one of my clients sites - fishmansfrags.co.uk/ does not suffer the same issue and after caching is lightning.

 

Css files, I am running through them all as I go along but this is something I am trying to do.

 

Javascripts - not really sure how I can do this as I tried in the past but ended up causing more issues than it would have caused, this is one reason I really wish Joomla would have just stuck with a unified JS library as I have jquery, joms.jquery (why they had to use their own version I will never know) and now the super bloated mootools 1.2 to add to all the minor scripts the components and modules load.

 

Frontend cache is turned on in Global Config, and I would prefer to enable page cache too (how do you limit the expiration time as I can only see a setting for browser cache in the plugin?)

 

The category tree is indeed setup to pull individual categories as  found this sped up matters over the latest items setting - I will give the 2.5 SVN a go as I have seen others say it has really improved speed, obviously my main concern was keeping the site running as stably as possible.

 

One final thing, I have a pro license for SIG Pro and have it installed to handle image galleries but actually run another plugin called SIGE above it in the plugins list as it handles watermarking on XL images - is watermarking something you are likely to add to SIGPro? Or should I continue with the alternaive??

Thanks for taking the time to look at it for me.

Ok, upgraded to 2.5SVN, left the site running for a day and the slowness has returned again, same setup as this time last night where all categories were equally quick. Now if I turn on page cache the server does not spike which is great but there seems to be no performance gain so far.

Fotis, a little feedback on this, I have combined a load of css files and done some other tweaks on todays SVN which shows the same lag but ONLY under this set of child categories - EG: The main category I used for the example above is 'articles' with a child category of 'product releases', if I take the product releases category out of articles and have it as a top level category it is quick to load again, back in 'articles' and it slows down.

 

If I move it within my 'site galleries' category it slows a little but nothing like that of the main 'articles' category so it seems to me that the like from main to sub category is perhaps slow on my site at least and for whatever reason I cannot see.

 For obvious reasons the main category and all of its subcategories have been listed and linked together and need to stay this way though I can easily take all the child categories out, list them as main categories and get the performance back but this leaves a headache of how then to display and link all the categories manually on one page (I hope you understand what I mean here as it is a little jumbled I'm sure)

Regards

 

Leigh

Hopefully finally...

 

Right the system I had in place was to use

 

Articles >

      Motorcycle News >

      Product Releases >

      General Articles >

And so on.... Having the articles nested is not the issue here as I have now found out - the issue, causing me ALL my problems it seems is the inherit parameters from setting which was originally set as Motorcycle News simply because the Articles category has a totally different layout.

 

I moved the inherit parameters from setting to Product releases - still slow... So I koved it back to one of the image galleries and it is fast - very fast, the only difference as far as I can see with the two categories is that one has a handful of articles and the other hundreds - lightbulb!

 

Ok so for the 3 most popular categories on the site (listed above) I have kept them nested within the main articles category but set inherit parameters from to NONE, result = fast loading categories. This is not 100% ideal as it means now I have 3 categories to setup whenever I make changes so if any of you genius bods at JW can figure out how to negate the performance hit created in this way I am open to suggestion, for now the site loads fast so I am loathe to fiddle any more today, I even went back to the original layout and split css files in my template to at least get to the bottom of it - at least now I can streamline the whole thing again.

 

regards

 

Leigh

Try to disable Joomla´s mtupgrade mootools plugin. (System - Mootools Upgrade)

Just to see if it will be faster without it.

Actually only if you are a guest - logged in users still have slow loading to conted with so I have been told - tested it myself and its right :(

bunglehaze said:
Hopefully finally...

 

Right the system I had in place was to use

 

Articles >

      Motorcycle News >

      Product Releases >

      General Articles >

And so on.... Having the articles nested is not the issue here as I have now found out - the issue, causing me ALL my problems it seems is the inherit parameters from setting which was originally set as Motorcycle News simply because the Articles category has a totally different layout.

 

I moved the inherit parameters from setting to Product releases - still slow... So I koved it back to one of the image galleries and it is fast - very fast, the only difference as far as I can see with the two categories is that one has a handful of articles and the other hundreds - lightbulb!

 

Ok so for the 3 most popular categories on the site (listed above) I have kept them nested within the main articles category but set inherit parameters from to NONE, result = fast loading categories. This is not 100% ideal as it means now I have 3 categories to setup whenever I make changes so if any of you genius bods at JW can figure out how to negate the performance hit created in this way I am open to suggestion, for now the site loads fast so I am loathe to fiddle any more today, I even went back to the original layout and split css files in my template to at least get to the bottom of it - at least now I can streamline the whole thing again.

 

regards

 

Leigh

This makes no difference and actually my site needs MT1.2 to function correctly anyway, what is your thinking of why the Mootools plugin would make a difference to loading of nested categories for registered or guest users? The obvious thought would be bandwidth but this would affect all nested categories and not just highly populated ones.

BBC said:
Try to disable Joomla´s mtupgrade mootools plugin. (System - Mootools Upgrade)

Just to see if it will be faster without it.

You write that about users after my comment.

I noticed slow down in some of my pages when i activate mtupgrade. Some problems that i coudn´t see in Firebug or Yslow.

 

Joomla works that way, plugin cache is disabled for logged in users. So that you experiencing between visitors-logged is normal, i believe.

The Joomla page cache works for guest users only which I know about but this issues was happening with the page cache plugin switched off as I explained in the first set of posts, since then the speed issue has been resolved for guest users but still exists for logged in users - a difference of 20 seconds per page load is simply massive and not something that can be easily swallowed as "normal"

BBC said:
You write that about users after my comment.

I noticed slow down in some of my pages when i activate mtupgrade. Some problems that i coudn´t see in Firebug or Yslow.

 

Joomla works that way, plugin cache is disabled for logged in users. So that you experiencing between visitors-logged is normal, i believe.

Your page load is not normal. Differences between visitors and users are normal, minus your problem with page load.

Never mind. Anyway , all tools show that you don´t have many IP Neighbours. Max 16, as i could see. So you know it is now problem with server.

 

By IP Neighbours do you mean how many other domains are on the server? I already  pointed out this is a private dedicated server with a handful of small sites hosted so it was not going to show up neighbours like on a shared host unless I am missing something there of course?

 

The differences between visitors and users I thought only came into effect with the page cache turned on, I have had mine turned off this whole time in order to get to the bottom of the loading times issue, the whole damn problem is baffling and annoying as my articles database grows every day and I am sure the loading times increase as they do..

As you say that other pages are OK at same server.

As it is your server check all server logs.

 

Check your .htacces file, if you have one. To much tweaking in .htacces can slow down page extremly, despite it doesn´t throw out some error messages.

 

I see you don´t have GZIP activated. Activate it at server, or in Joomla, not both. Your problem is huge, so it will help a little bit maybe.

 

You have expire headers for everything. This page should fly.

 

I have just 2 questions:

- Do you update K2 via Joomla installer, or just overwrite files at server ?

- Doe´s your internet provider knows you are using line for hosting ?

 

I think the only mods to htaccess have been to :

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.bikechatter.co.uk$ [NC]RewriteRule ^(.*)$ bikechatter.co.uk/$1 [R=301,L]

 

# Turn off eTagsHeader unset ETagFileETag none# Check that the expires module has been installed<IfModule mod_expires.c>ExpiresActive OnExpiresDefault "access plus 10 years"ExpiresByType image/gif "access plus 10 years"ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access plus 10 years"ExpiresByType image/png "access plus 10 years"ExpiresByType text/css "access plus 10 years"ExpiresByType text/html "access plus 1 seconds"ExpiresByType text/javascript "access plus 10 years"ExpiresByType application/x-unknown-content-type "access plus 10 years"ExpiresByType application/x-javascript "access plus 10 years"

 

Gzip is activated in Joomla backend and is used on the server but for some reason I do not understand it does not seem to gzip a lot of files it should (according to firebug and pagespeed)

 

As you say with expires headers and the way the site is generally setup it should be rapid and on a lot of pages it is - apart from my nested categories with over a hundred articles in each, this SHOULD not cause an issue in K2 so something is not playing ball.

 

Answers to you Q are:

I only ever update my sites manually with file overwrites using a root access sftp

I am not sure what you mean by this? If I understand correctly though - I do not host the server on my personal ISP, the server is based in a US datacentre and is a fully managed package so there should be no issues with the tech.

Try to update K2 allways via Joomla installer. Because you can miss some important change in mysql database, when you just overwrite files at server.

Can not be sure, because K2 has not ordinary changelog. Or i could not find it.

 

If you have many tweaks outside template override just use Winmerge and set it all back, if it goes that way.

Activate GZIP via .htaccess, and disable Joomla GZIP.

www.leewillis.co.uk/gzip-joomla-tips-faster-website/

Fotis, just wondering if you ever got round to having a look at the potential bottleneck here? I am still having massive loading times for logged in users and rapid loading for guests. I have kept updated with the 2.5 SVN every few days or so in case of a fix but still see the same issue.

 

Leigh

Thanks to Fotis and Lefteris my woes are now solved and fixed in the latest 2.5SVN - thread found here:

community.getk2.org/forum/topics/still-seeing-massive