XF 1.1 Speeding up XF?

[nando99]

So yeah, I've noticed my site has been running a little slower then usual and after asking my host for some advice they asked me the questions below. I have no idea, so I'm asking here.

Questions:
1) Force XF to use static files for CSS instead css.php
2) Combine javascript
3) Remove versioning from static files like this: /community/css.phpcss=editor_ui,moderator_bar,panel_scroller&style=6&dir=LTR&d=1358535224

Any info is appreciated, thanks in advance!

 

[Jake Bunce]

What kind of server? Shared? Dedicated? VPS?

The single biggest performance boost is to install an opcode cache like APC. Just install APC into your PHP config:

http://php.net/manual/en/book.apc.php

No XenForo configuration is required.

You can go farther and implement a memory cache in the library/config.php file. APC can be used as a memory cache:

http://xenforo.com/community/threads/tip-use-apc.6456/

But an opcode cache is the big one.

 

[tenants]

It sounds like they have just run Google PageSpeed test against your site.

If you run google PageSpeed (dowload here), for each of the options they give you some advice.

A few more performance tools are mentioned here
https://developers.google.com/speed/tools


Some of the most common / favorites:

• pingdom: http://tools.pingdom.com
• YSlow: http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/
• Speed Tracer: https://developers.google.com/web-toolkit/speedtracer/
• Webpage Test: http://www.webpagetest.org/ (as mentioned)

The easiest option you can do that they have mentioned is removing the versioning (I don't agree that files should be versioned for security, but if they are not, when you upgrade, unless the browser cache is cleared, user may still be using an old version of the static file). But that will require changes to the core files (not recomeded if you are planing to upgrade)

I mentioned combing JavaScript and CSS would be an issue before I first joined (I'm an insane performance fanatic)
XenForo Dev (Mike) gave some pretty good answers, see here:

http://xenforo.com/community/thread...y-request-what-can-be-done.18381/#post-238753

Regarding CSS, you'll only ever see 2 requests per page. The first is always the same, everywhere. This is requested once and never again (unless it changes). The second loads page specific CSS and it too is cached, but the URL will often differ. If you wanted to reduce this to 1 request, I imagine you could, but it's just going to hurt cache locality. Every time there's a different included bit of CSS, you'll be forcing the user to redownload the entirety of the base CSS. So it's an extra request on the first view leading to larger savings on subsequent views.

You'd have to hack things up to fold the JS together, at the expense of cache locality. In an average production case, you can far-future-expire the whold JS.

(And they now make better use of sprites)