Speeding up site on Windows Server 2019

[NealC]

My site seems slow, not sure what to change. I have the IIS response headers to cache the styles and data folder for 3 days, not sure it's working though as page loads seem slow. I don't know if XF 2.x is defeating the cache, or what. PHP has zend_opcache enabled.

What can I do to improve performance of XF 2 on Windows Server? PHP 7.latest and MySQL is on a separate server.

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[Kirby]

• TTFB seems a bit slow
  Try to find out why (enable Debug mode, take a look at queries & page creation time)
• Increase the cache time for styles, js, data
  There normally isn't a reason to cache this just for 3 days; usually we cache this for a year as all standard resources do have a cache buster (query string) anyway
• Optimize images (if possible)
• Make sure SVGs do get compressed
• Reconsider if you really want to/must use Google fonts as fonts are render blocking
• Reconsider if you really need 3 trackers (Google Analytics, Facebook and Bing)
• Turn off the editor for guests, that does slows thing down significantly and from my erperience isn't use often anyway
• Load jQuery locally

 

[dknife]

Turn off the editor for guests, that does slow thing down significantly and in my erperience isn't use often anyway

If guests aren't allowed to post, does it still load the editor at all? Is this recommendation related to the Admin option "Allow guests to use the rich text editor"?

 

[Kirby]

If guests aren't allowed to post, does it still load the editor at all?

If the option mentioned below and "Writing before registering" is active and one of the configured usergroups can post: Yes.

Is this recommendation related to the Admin option "Allow guests to use the rich text editor"?

Yep, this is exactly the option I was referring to - turn that off.

Full editor JavaScript loaded upon initial page load for guests

If a forum does have writing before registering enable and a guest reads a thread, the editor does get initialized upon initial page load although the editor is usually way below the fold. This is a significant waste of resources in both bandwidth and JavaScript processing time as most of the...

xenforo.com

 

[NealC]

I ended up bringing up an Ubuntu 20.04 server which was a good experience for me being new to Linux. The site is amazingly faster but probably mainly due to the much better caching working on ubuntu apache vs IIS (probably something I wasn't doing right). With caching of images css etc. and also redis (thanks @Xon) my XF sites are screaming fast.

 

[Kirby]

With caching of images css etc. and also redis (thanks @Xon) my XF sites are screaming fast.

I actually wouldn't call this screaming fast but rather "still a lot to do"

https://www.webpagetest.org/result/210918_BiDcZF_02cc667290e24d9f9a7ce8923fb03dd6


Things I would do

• Fix caching
• Get rid of Google Fonts
• Get rid of Bing and Facebook tracking pixels
• Deliver static resouces (JS/CSS) with Brotli instang of GZip (if supported by browser)
• Optimize Image/Deliver public images as webp (if supported by browser)
• Load jQuery locally

 

[NealC]

Thank you @Kirby - there is still work to do. It is faster than before and I appreciate the homework so I can continue to improve things. I'll get to work on the above soon.

 

[m1ne]

I ended up bringing up an Ubuntu 20.04 server which was a good experience for me being new to Linux. The site is amazingly faster but probably mainly due to the much better caching working on ubuntu apache vs IIS (probably something I wasn't doing right). With caching of images css etc. and also redis (thanks @Xon) my XF sites are screaming fast.

Windows definitely not ideal for hosting, for sure.
You'll see even more performance gains if you use OpenLiteSpeed/Litespeed.

 

[NealC]

I would appreciate anyone sharing their caching strategy in their .htaccess, or whever you have it for images, js, css, etc. Can you share your cache code?

Thanks

 

[Kirby]

I'd recommended to not use Apache at all and if you have to use Apache I'd try to disable .htaccess.

If you have to use Apache and you do not have special requirements smth. like

<LocationMatch "^/(js|styles|data)/">
Header set Cache-Control "max-age=31536000, public"
Header unset Last-Modified
Header unset ETag
FileETag None
</LocationMatch>

should work.

Otherwise just searching for "Apache Cache-Control" in your favourite search engine should bring up dozens of websites explaining how to configure caching.

 

[NealC]

What do you suggest @Kirby instead of Apache? This server is temporary, a newer fast one is coming online soon so I'll be doing this all over again. Linux (ubuntu) primary for XF sites.

 

[Kirby]

We use nginx, but (Open)LiteSpeed is popular as well and usally beats nginx in terms of performance.

So if you don't need all the bells and whistles that would be possible with nginx, take a look at (Open)LiteSpeed.