Hi Juz,

I am sorry but currently we do not have the tutorial on how to optimise EasySocial on your server In the latest version of EasySocial, we actually did alot of performance optimisation in terms of MySQL queries, the way javascript being load, optimise the php code to improve the page load and etc. Anyway, not sure if you've already read below threads or not about how you can configure your servers to load EasySocial faster.

http://stackideas.com/forums/easysocial-going-kinda-slow
http://stackideas.com/forums/site-loading-very-slowly
http://stackideas.com/forums/overal-performance-feedback

By the way, did you get any slow-log from your MySQL server? Also, maybe you can provide us the access to your EasySocial frontend so that we can see how the page load speed from our end?

Please advise.

Hope this help and have a nice day!

Hi Sam,

Thanks for sharing the links. Had read the last 2 and now reading thru the 1st one. Have included site details. Especially concerned with load time on tablet devices and access via browser [chrome/safari]. Appreciate any recommendations for both tablets as well as desktops.

Cheers!

Following

Subscribed. I hear that there will be a big overhaul with JavaScript optimizations with ES 2.0.

Hi Juz,

Thanks for the site details. I've checked your site using firefox's firebug and it seems like the initial request made to server is pretty fast, approx. 1.5 seconds. Please see http://screencast.com/t/d482K38Rb

However, when the server serve the media files, e.g. css file, javascript files and images, it took quite some times. Please see http://screencast.com/t/BxbRRB4zhw So i guess your issue was related on how fast your server serving the files.

Maybe you can take a look at the apache's mod_pagespeed module ( http://modpagespeed.com ) to optimise your page load speed

Hope this help

1.5s initial response (first byte) is a terrible response time! That instantly needs work.

Maybe you could give us a little more information on what type of hosting you have. I am presuming it is linux based and probably on shared hosting? Which web server do the hosting company use and do you have any idea on what distro it is based upon (Ubuntu, CentOS ect)?

Any hardware specs?

My company actually specializes in server optimization but it is impossible to optimize shared hosting as you need complete freedom to install your own software and root access to the command shell via SSH. This just is not an option on shared hosting.

Getting serious performance from your web application is a combination of good coding, efficient SQL query optimization then comes the hardware and exactly how that is set-up including the operating system overhead. of course, hosting on decent hardware really helps!

If you want an extra instant performance boost, consider a VPS and installing your own software stack. We swear by NGINX (simply the fastest web server in the world) and PHP-FPM. Then both NGINX and PHP-FPM can be tweaked to serve a first byte time under 100ms (as fast as the Google front page loads). A VPS running on SSD's will certainly shave seconds instantly off your load times. You can also employ a whole mirage of cache techniques to massively increase load times and server hundreds of logged in users. We use a combination of opt caches native to the latest PHP, memcached (caches the database and handles sessions directly in memory) then Varnish 4 to supercharge the front end and handle any users not logged in. Varnish also caches entire pages and serves static files instantly from memory.

We also optimize the database every couple of days. Database optimization is never a fire and forget operation. It needs constant review as your traffic demands and usage change. As mentioned hosting the database on a SSD will give you a huge performance increase in itself.

Of course you can also mount the entire joomla cache folder directly to memory. It is very possible to serve pages (dashboard and all complex pages) in under a second. We know this because we are already doing it!

I will help you if I can and maybe write some tutorials for the community.

Awesome post Matthew. Although your comment to 1.5 s made me cringe;) Anyway that's what this post is about, to learn how do we optimize performance.

The stats published on Sam's post are for our Ubuntu12.01, apache hosting on DigitalOcean VPS with 1GB memory, 1 core, 2TB transfer with CloudFlare CDN. 30 users but probably none logged in at testing time. No additional server performance tweaks apart from htaccess optimization to define CSS/JPEG expiry etc. We do have SSH access. Have not tried NGNIX but definitely would consider if such a significant difference. The site only hosts ES1.3.30 and layered with a template that may also be causing some delays. We understand that the template may be adding slightly to slow performance. We can try to avoid any template altogether and run the stats again for ES1.3.30 load times.

Didn't consider database tuning at this point and not sure how. Looks like we need help in a few different areas.

Cheers!!!

Hi Sam,

Thanks for your post. We enabled mod_pagespeed but that's only given a marginal boost if any. Are there any recommendations on website templates that SI team has found to be integrating well without much performance penalty. We currently host only ES1.3.30 and with increase in user base the performance seems to be suffering. Perhaps there are other performance tweaks we should explore before migrating to a better server infra.

Thoughts, comments....

Cheers!

Hi Juz,

I am really sorry for the delay of this reply. This topic is mainly subjective and there a lot of things that can affecting the speed of your site. However despite all that, webhosting choice will always become the number one factor that can determined the overall performance of your site. I've checked your site and it seems like you are doing quite well with all of the optimization in place.

Your site Initial request is around 0.7 seconds, http://screencast.com/t/Ma2AAP4f1h7 which is not bad at all. Perhaps you can try to take a look at the following url regarding on the optimization tips that you can try on your site, http://www.joomspot.net/how-to-speed-up-optimize-joomlas-performance.html . If it still not going well, perhaps you can try to follow Matthew suggestion to switch your webhosting with a better one.

Hi Ezrul & other members,

Thanks for the suggestions. We'll keep trying. Meanwhile does anyone have suggestions/recommendations on website templates that run optimized for ES? Like the ones from Airbnb or Twitter. Would like to explore further.

Cheers!

Wanderers works fine with EasySocial and it is less heavy too as it doesn't have any frameworks

Another good lightweight and quick template is Nano 3 - http://yootheme.com/demo/joomla/nano3

We have used that template for a few projects with some customization.

Hi Matthew,

Thanks for the suggestion.

subscribed !

Thanks heading up on this.