Hi there, you may check these threads for some refferences
http://stackideas.com/forums/server-related-costs-as-sites-grow
http://stackideas.com/forums/options-for-fast-growing-website-hosting-space-dedicated-hosting-server-or-vps

Also, you may enable cache (browser) using jotcache, memcache and APC. i would also suggest you use lean LEMP stack with CDN. My site loads below 4 seconds with a lot of users in it using those. By the way, I haven't even moved it on a production server where there are separate memcache and MariaDB.

Steve, EasySocial is very heavy software. All the features we begged for mean more processing power is needed. I have seen complaints from colleagues similar to yours. I agree with Ken about moving to a LEMP stack (Linux, nginx, MySQL and PHP). Note that Apache is not there. Apache is a very inefficient webserver.

Here is my ES site with a response time of 0.80s in Pagespeed Insights: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fmiraargentina.com%2Fcomunidad. Note that it is loaded over https which slows things down and does not allow Google Pagespeed Module to run. Run my homepage through the same tool to see how incredibly optimized you can get a Joomla site when in the right environment: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=miraargentina.com

I do not use K2. Much prefer JReviews. The cost is well worth it, but even JReviews will add a couple tenths to your response times due to its sheer power and complexity.

Ken and Steven, really appreciate for Your suggestions.
I will try to start with nginx and post some results with improvements here later.

Steve, there aren't any hosts out there that offer managed nginx hosting. However, with a few hours of learning (that is, if you don't already get around with SFTP, SSH and command line) you can set up a very lean setup with a LAMP stack with nginx running as a front-end proxy for Apache. You can do this easily on DigitalOcean or Amazon EC2 using ServerPilot.io as a control panel. Then it's a quick configuration file change to go 100% nginx. The nice thing about the EC2 + ServerPilot setup is that it is a very lean installation. No FTP, no email, no phpMyAdmin, no cPanel. ServerPilot has good docs about setting everything up.

I recommend Nginx, MariaDB, PHP-FPM5, APC or Zend OpCache (depending on whether you are on PHP 5.4 or 5.5), NGX_Pagespeed (For combining files, compressing images, minifying files etc.)

That combined with an optimized My.cnf , http://www.conf and php.ini.

Personally I haven't had the best luck with Memcached, but that is just me. Test what works for you.

Hey guys,

The issue here seems to be mostly related to the K2 - System plugin. I am not really sure what it actually does but if it's trying to manipulate the contents of the page, this is going to cause massive hiccups. This is the same for the following plugins (That I am aware of):

1. System - jQuery Easy
2. System - JFBConnect (I have already spoken with Alex, and he agrees that there's a better way to handle this. I believe he's working on a new version to address this hiccups).
3. System - K2

If you guys are going to use any of the plugins above, do expect that your load time increases as the page size increases. The more modules you add (more html codes), the heavier it gets.

Mark, you are correct about JFBC. It does add a few tenths to response time. Alex has been improving it and it is getting better and better.

The more stuff you add to a site, the more power/optimization you need to deliver it effectively. I have moved to a strategy of consolidating things on dedicated pages.
-A dedicated login page (EasySocial)
-A dedicated search page
-A dedicated blog page (blog posts not present on every page via module - unless your site is blog-dependent)
-Keep the homepage and other pages with only the modules that are really necessary.

Everyone needs to remember that a module loads at least one CSS and one JS file, and sometimes quite a few files, and each module published is just heaping on more scripts, stylesheets and DB queries. So even though we have all this cool stuff at our disposal, it's important to remember that our sites need to be lean and focused. Too much info means too many files loaded and probably too much stuff for the average user to digest, anyway. I think it's important to determine what the primary goal of the site is and focus on that, and leave all the other components on their own pages, accessible through menu items. Joomla has so many cool tools it's easy to turn sites into "Jack of all trades, master of none".

Here is an example of a fully dysfunctional homepage:

-EasySocial Module
-EasyBlog Module
-EasyDiscuss Module
-SC (JFBC) Login Module
-3rd-party search module (AJAX Live, RokAjaxSearch, etc...)
-K2/JReviews module(s) showing various categories/articles and/or ratings
-Slideshow gallery module (RokSprocket, RokGallery, etc...)

Sure, you might have the "coolest" homepage out there, but do you users really "get it"? Is the stress on the server and resulting slow pages worth it? Do your users really need to know about and access all that stuff from a single page?

And here is the worst culprit of all: SEO plugins. They destroy all the hard work devs put in to optimizing DB queries. If a component you are using needs a 3rd-party SEF plugin to be presentable, then you are using the wrong component. Find one that does things right, even if you have to pay for it.

[EDIT] Forgot to mention templates! Some can load dozens of JS and CSS files! And some also have framework plugins that are extremely poorly coded and can be a big strain on your response times! [/EDIT]

Thanks for sharing this Steven, finally someone who doesn't just point fingers on EasySocial Appreciate it very much! I have been trying to explain this to many of our customers that the delays are actually a domino effect because of a larger page size (Due to HTML5 tags).

Guys, thank You so much for Your suggestions. I have optimezed my community to load in about 800ms with only APC! Will post some results later when i will launch site for public.
Also i have found a BUG, that gives extra 200+ms to load time and its joomla language, when i change to the other language it ads a +200ms to respone time, don't know why. I did not a research on this. Maybe it affects only me, so You may check yourself.

Regards,
Steve

Nice, thanks for sharing Steve If I recall correctly, the language file loading time is much longer if you have lots of language files (Which was why we stripped down all the language files into only 1 single language file).

Steve wrote:

Guys, thank You so much for Your suggestions. I have optimezed my community to load in about 800ms with only APC! Will post some results later when i will launch site for public.
Also i have found a BUG, that gives extra 200+ms to load time and its joomla language, when i change to the other language it ads a +200ms to respone time, don't know why. I did not a research on this. Maybe it affects only me, so You may check yourself.

Regards,
Steve

hello Steve, can you share with as the solution to get 800ms ? my site begin to be slow .. i have yootheme as template + ES+ED+EB+Zoo+jfbconnect

Hi guys,

Thanks for sharing.