Hello Jim,

My personal recommendation / favorite setup:

1. PHP APC cache
2. Nginx
3. Optimized my.cnf as the default my.cnf for MySQL is not really optimized
4. Remove unnecessary extensions / modules / plugins.
5. CDN is a must!

Excellent. We are on Bluehost VPS for now and I'll run this by them. They say CloudFlare CDN is part of all packages but also offer it is a "Pro" version for $15. I guess I'll check it out. I think I've already reviewed all your products that I've used but count on me for a testimonial if ever needed. Also I think this is a cool site in that it graphically integrates Easyblog, EasyDiscuss and EasySocial. I am happy to help boarders curious to know how we did it.
-Jim G.

Any recommendations on control panel cache settings? Or do they really not matter so much?

Hello Jim,

If you have PHP's APC installed, configure your Joomla Global Configuration to use the APC cache Sure, if you use our products, feel free to post a review at the following URLs

http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/clients-a-communities/communities/25616
http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/authoring-a-content/blog/12630
http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/contacts-and-feedback/articles-comments/20527
http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/communication/question-a-answers/16123

Which cache setting would you recommend for using with APC Mark? Conservative or Progressive?

Any tips on mySQL and APC settings too? I'm trying to speed up the page load time of the dashboard because 6s is way too slow.

Hello Gavin,

I actually did tested this on our stackideas.com and both Conservative / Progressive with PHP APC and it was causing issues This has nothing to do with any extensions but the issue is with Joomla's login system itself. I have heard good raves about memcached and Joomla, maybe you want to give that a try?

Oh I thought you said above to use APC and to configure your joomla global config to use it?
I have it on Conservative settings with APC the past 24 hours or so and haven't noticed any problems with logins yet, but I do remember having issues with it once before when using the normal joomla file cache. I'll keep an eye on it.

What cache are you using for stackideas then, memcached? I tried that yesterday and it brought my site to it's knees. Timeouts and gateway errors - had to turn it off. I didn't spend much time configuring it though so wouldn't rule it out, but I did read that it causes a lot of problems with joomla. The article was saying that it's fine with joomla itself, but a lot of extensions cause problems and actually slow the site down. I would like to give it another try though because I believe my problems are caused on the database level, especially with Easysocial because it's quite db intensive isn't it? Are the stackideas extensions (especially ES) written with memcached in mind? Do they actually make use of it for the sql calls?

It all starts with the host in my opinion. I had my Joomla site on a VPS in which no matter what I did (CDN, Cache, minify, whatever) my Time to First Byte was always > 8 seconds. Even though the VPS showed no excessive memory usage. Finally moved to a different host where I can control disks, memory and CPU and I'm back in business.

Here's the thing, we don't run any cache on our site at all now We are running on stock apache and massively tuned configuration for it.

By the way, on an average, each of our page load takes < 500ms - 700ms (depending on which page you are on) . It doesn't also mean that caching would speed things up, it really depends on what you are after.

Caching makes perfect sense if your site is static most of the time. If you are expecting lots of interaction, forget about caching altogether as it does not make any sense caching anything at all

Scenario:

You cache the entire article page with Komento. So it's super fast and all, but what if you get a comment that's posted every 15 - 30 minutes? The cache needs to be reloaded and it defeats the purpose of caching anything.

Also, you must remember that the "initial" page load for the system to start caching stuffs would always be the slowest because additional process takes place to cache contents. Subsequent requests are much faster though

Hello guys, i am interested in this, did you find the best configuation for cache ?