Hello Steve,

Are you testing this based on any performance testing tools or is this just by your observation? Did you also installed any plugins recently on the site?

By the way, is it possible for you to provide us with the back end and FTP access to your site to check on this issue? You may store your site access at http://stackideas.com/dashboard/site so you don't have to provide these information all the time

Thanks mark, access update in my dashboard.

I use tools.kingdom.com to test.

It always used to run about about 3.5 second per load, which I hoped would come down after upgrading to easy social 2. In fact its now about 5 seconds, both on pingdom and observable. I'm really worried about it - I built the site in preparation for a major third party product launch and if I'm slow out of the gates now I might not be able to establish a large enough user base to make my ideas work.

Thanks so much for your help!

Also no, only plugins installed recently are the ones in the easyblog, easydiscuss and easysocial updates

Hello Steve,

Those tools are not 100% accurate to be honest because they are calculating the time spent after downloading everything including images, javascript files, css file. You can't really compare this with previous versions because your home page now and your home page before could have different result sets since there are people uploading images, sharing embedded media's etc.

What is important is the initial load of your page. For instance take a look at this,

1. Time spent for initial load with existing plugins enabled, http://take.ms/HfQY7

2. Time spent for initiali load after disabling the following plugins, http://take.ms/AWrmK
- System Plugin - jGive API development
- System - Techjoomla Assets Loader

Wow, thank you mark, that's a real eye opener. How did/do you know which to look at? Is it just trial an error?

Hello Steve,

About 90% of the time, slowness are caused by system plugins. From there, I simply just tried to unpublish some plugins to see if they are actually causing delays to the page.

System plugins are rendered on all pages of your Joomla site and if not handled carefully, it will / may slow the site down.

Example of bad system plugins:

- Plugin that does search / replace of html codes from Joomla's output
- Plugin that sends out e-mails on page load

These plugins responsibility are to heavy to be in a plugin and more often causes issues when your HTML structure is large.

This is also why I would never venture into Wordpress The whole architecture around Wordpress is exactly like a system plugin. Everything is loaded on every single page.

Thanks Mark, that's a great help! I managed to trace a few more that had crept in over time that I've now fired out of a cannon, and I've plumped for Cloudflare CDN service too, and performance seems much better.

Only problem is, somewhere along the line the javascript buttons in easydiscuss have clapped out. Again, I can't be sure whether this is a new issue, predates my complaints, or part of shutting off some of these system plugins. I've tried reinstalling and confirmed all the plugins (except content, which breaks my site, so please don't reactivate it!) are activated, I've got a wildcarded bypass for the page from cloudflare, so I honestly can't see what the issue might be. Could it be that the javascript for easydiscuss relies on a third party plugin?

See below - report button is totally dead, as are all the buttons on an individual post.

http://theendzone.co/forum/17-first.html#replies

Hello Steve,

I believe cloudflare is causing some issues when it compresses everything into a single line, http://take.ms/AOrqC . It's not ideal to do that as it would break scripts.

Superb - thanks!

I'll mark as resolved, but if you have any other suggestions on speeding up the site, I'd love to hear them!

You are most welcome Steve