Over the last few months I have mentioned a massive bottleneck on my K2 site, complained about it to Fotis who asked me to report back with a few things so he could help and consequently figured out on my site with a couple of thousand articles any logged in user gets around a 25-45 second lag from the initial page load to finally viewing the content which is clearly not good enough at all.

So having spent a considerable amount of time removing/adding/compressing, files, articles and settings etc across my Joomla site I have come across no other problem than K2 itself being at the heart of this, I have tried to update my bottleneck thread to catch the attantion of Fotis again but had no replies so here we go on another thread I guess will go largely ignored.

From the most basic level I have setup a subdomain, fresh install of Joomla, fresh install of K2 2.5SVN and added in the menu links - that is all, no other plugins or components for the initial test.

Empty cache, not logged in and a few seconds later up pops the page I request,

Empty cache, log in, 25-45 second lag.

 

There is nothing else here complicating the matter other than asking K2 to load a page on the standard J1.5 template shipped out of the box.

Initially I upgraded from 2.4.1 to SVN on the recommendation of Fotis who said it would cure the loading issue, it has not. I have taken my categories out of being nested on another recommendation that it would fix the issue, it has not. I have taken the categories from using other category settings on the recommendation it would fix the issue - it has not and finally I have enabled catalog mode - yes on each of these categories as I was recommeded this would fix the issue, bet you can't guess this though but it has not!

My site sees over 200,000 monthly visitors, it is under load all hours of every day and making changes like this to fix an issue that is still unfixed is not only really difficult but because the issue remains on a CLEAN Joomla and K2 install it appears there is a problem in K2 even after these changes have been made.

I appreciate that other sites may run just fine but after reporting this for months now I am at the end of my tether - especially as my reportings have been considerably detailed enough for someone who works on K2 to have an idea where the problem could stem from and yet I am left hanging after each time I post a thread up, the community cannot help here - this seems clear to me so I ask you, on a clean install of Joomla and K2 with thousands of articles loaded up what else is there left for me to attempt to change before one of you K2 guys accept there is a problem somewhere and help not only me but other community members in a similar situation?

I have just installed ZOO 2.4 free version as a side by side comparison to my K2 install, created an instance and imported all the K2 articles over from that.

 

Loading times: Based on a category with 292 articles

 

Not logged in - 50Mb/s connection

K2 2.5SVN - 8seconds

ZOO 2.4.3 - sub 1 second

 

Logged in

K2 2.5SVN - 90+ seconds

Zoo 2.4.3 - 1.5 seconds

 

That is a direct test on a basic site, installed are K2 and the associated articles and Zoo with the imported articles from K2, no additional javascripts loaded other than base install, tested with both rhuk milkyway and Gavick Sporter templates and similar results for both.

If any of you K2 bods are able to help I would appreciate you either taking a look for yourself or getting me to provide info, the only alternative I can see here is to take a lengthy process for me to switch away from K2 to something like ZOO which I do not want to have to do - I recommend my clients use K2 for their own site's and apart from this loading issue have generally been happy with the component.

I have found something odd within K2 also,

If I setup a content category to inherit parameters from a specific category (competitions) on my site it speeds up considerably but throws up an error message with reporting turned on, if I then set inherit parameters to none and use the exact same settings as the competitions category it is slow again but does not display the error message.

 

I have tried juggling these settings around between different categories but for some reason it only affects the competitions category and regardless of being logged in or out the speed matches that of ZOO. Where could an issue like this be coming from and how on earth would I try and fix it?

 

Error message in competitions category:

Notice: Undefined property: stdClass::$imagenone in /var/www/vhosts/bikechatter.co.uk/subdomains/fix/httpdocs/components/com_k2/helpers/utilities.php on line 149

 

It appears that the only difference between the slow loading categories and the competitions category is that of images, in competitions I do have any images loading in category view but for all other cats I need them showing, if I enable images the speed grinds to a halt all over again despite there only being less than 100k of images to load.

Hi. Obviously it has to do with your setup since the parameters affect the performance. Try to set the "Catalog mode" to "Yes" under category settings. If you have menu link to multiple categories then try to set "Fetch items from children categories" to "No" in the menu link settings. Try to do the same for mod_k2_content. This will reduce the amount of the queries executed by K2. For those who need the recursive functionality, we have changed the way it works, and it will be much more faster in the next release. I took as granted that this is causing your site to be slow, as it is the most resource consuming part of K2. You should also try to disable some plugins and see if some of them are causing the delay. Finally make sure that Joomla! cache is enabled and K2 modules are setup to use the cache. You can also try to enable the system cache plugin which will improve the site performance.

Lefteris, the brand new installation has only a few menu links in order to bypass any of this.

 

It is a new install, loaded with K2 data and installed Zoo with imported K2 articles.

 

Catalog mode yes/no makes no difference.

 

Changing parameters in each category make no difference, disabling images makes no difference with the exception of a single category - competitions.

 

I am testing this with and without the joomla cache but typically it is always enabled.

 

I have disabled all plugins except base Joomla plugins as already described above - there is nothing else loaded other than Joomla out of the box, K2 and Zoo. Menu items are linked to the K2 categories and a mirror of the same for Zoo to be able to compare.

 

I appreciate your reply Lefteris, but this is the same few things I have been advised over and over again by both you and Fotis and none of the above make the slightest difference. I would accept it is my system IF I had not setup a totally fresh install and simply used the same content data but I am sure you will agree that by stripping the system down to basic components as I have there is nothing else that can interfere or conflict.

 

Could it be a remnant of an early version of K2 that is causing an issue? I have been using K2 since the very first releases and upgraded each time, I would ideally like to export all my data out and then do a brand new install of K2 and import this csv/xml data to try a totally clean import but K2 still does not this functionality.

 

I have changed all my categories to inherit parameters from the fast category on my main site and it is not faster but I really need to get to the bottom of the problem so this cannot happen again in future. BTW what do you mean by you have changed the way recursive looks in the next release? Which version are we talking here as I have been using 2.5 for a while now and have the latest version installed from yesterday.

 

I am almost sure that something else is causing the delay. Can you post a URL of your site so we can take a look? Have you enabled the Joomla! debug mode to see the amount of queries that K2 executes? Is it high?

I have linked to both the production site and testing site. I have setup a category or 2 using 'normal' parameters and the rest with parameters taken from the fast category so you can see directly the difference. On the test site I will setup a user named user/password user so you can see logged in and out differences too.

 

Debugging has never shown high queries on any of the settings I have used, right now I am using query caching on the production site but have not got it on the test site. As I have said there is no obvious reason for this issue on my site, I have pretty much gone through it all with a fine toothcomb and by setting up the test site have been able to exclude other components/scripts from the equation.

 

Production site:

 

bikechatter.co.uk - I have set all the categories to use the competitions category parameters for usability.

I am aware the site uses a lot of css and scripts which is the reason for side by side trials with the test site.

 

Test Site:

 

fix.bikechatter.co.uk

 

Clean except for Joomla,K2 and Zoo

OK It seems we found and solved the issue. The fix site is already running the new SVN version. Upgrading to a fresh SVN version will solve the issue. Note that since this is a SVN version you are highly recommended to backup your current site first. You can also do some further testing on the fix domain. Thanks for reporting this issue to us.

Lefteris/Fotis, thanks for taking the time to look. Out of interest what was the cause and fix for the issue? Anything that was conflicting, a setting that could have been dealt with myself or a bug somewhere?

 

regards

 

leigh