http://www.silverstripe.org/home/ http://www.silverstripe.org/how-to-improve-website-performance/#PageComment_10618 Hi Julian,

Thank you for this very usefull post - it happened to be posted just as i needed to optimise a site.

Just with some htaccess tweaks, combining of files and the partial caching i achieved very nice results.

Btw. i used tools.pingdom.com and Google Page Speed Insights for FF to guide me. Tue, 23 Oct 2012 00:39:00 +1300 Thomas B. Nielsen http://www.silverstripe.org/how-to-improve-website-performance/#PageComment_10618 http://www.silverstripe.org/how-to-improve-website-performance/#PageComment_10587 Check into XHProf for profiling sites too - brilliant for identifying bottlenecks. Thu, 18 Oct 2012 12:50:24 +1300 Marcus http://www.silverstripe.org/how-to-improve-website-performance/#PageComment_10587 http://www.silverstripe.org/how-to-improve-website-performance/#PageComment_10586 Thanks for all the tips, everyone. Thanks especially for recommending Varnish. I haven't used that myself yet, but will now look into it.

Peter, the initial load could be taking longer because of SilverStripe is rebuilding the template cache. I think your /tmp directory might be getting cleared automatically every day, so on the initial page load, SilverStripe needs to recompile all the templates. A process that can take ~4 seconds. This is the same thing that happens when you add ?flush=all to your URL.

Simon, thanks for the htaccess tip. One thing to be aware of when turning off "AllowOverride" is that the htaccess file in the SilverStripe assets folder sets a bunch of upload filetype protections to prevent hacking of your server. Be sure to include these in your virtual host configuration so that you don't open yourself up to security risks.

Thanks again,
Julian Thu, 18 Oct 2012 10:31:52 +1300 Julian Seidenberg http://www.silverstripe.org/how-to-improve-website-performance/#PageComment_10586 http://www.silverstripe.org/how-to-improve-website-performance/#PageComment_10579 So I have some silverstripe websites on a shared host (I know, thats stupid...), and what I noticed is that they are quite fast / fast enough but only *after* the initial (load of the day). The initial load takes sometimes about 4-5 seconds, so really noticeable.

Have you any idea what causes this and how to circumvent it? Wed, 17 Oct 2012 21:09:27 +1300 peter http://www.silverstripe.org/how-to-improve-website-performance/#PageComment_10579 http://www.silverstripe.org/how-to-improve-website-performance/#PageComment_10578 Awesome, Julian, nice writeup.
As Simon just pointed out, I agree, installing an optcode cache can really speed things up as well (as it caches the PHP precompiled code).
I've tried xcache and APC, and stayed with APC as it seems to be more maintained.

Furthermore for REAL speed improvements when static caching is not an option, try a tool like Varnish. I've tested it on one SS site where the host set it up, and installed it myself (as proof of concept) on an own box.
It checks each page's headers, and only if a new page is needed, it fetches them from Apache, else it serves a memory-cached version. For an idea of what kind of speed this can give you on a normal SS install, check out http://www.intoeternitythemovie.com/
Wed, 17 Oct 2012 21:02:31 +1300 Anselm Christophersen http://www.silverstripe.org/how-to-improve-website-performance/#PageComment_10578 http://www.silverstripe.org/how-to-improve-website-performance/#PageComment_10576 I was quite surprised to see no mention of Varnish being used as a reverse proxy cache. Also tools like logstalgia or gltail to visualize back end log activity are useful. If caching is not correctly configured then it becomes quickly very obvious. Wed, 17 Oct 2012 18:08:15 +1300 Gordon Anderson http://www.silverstripe.org/how-to-improve-website-performance/#PageComment_10576 http://www.silverstripe.org/how-to-improve-website-performance/#PageComment_10575 Some things that can really speed things up:
- Install a php-opcode cache. Our server load dropped from 1-2 under normal use to 0.05 after installing xcache.

- Move your .htaccess content into your virtual host and disable .htaccess files with AllowOverride None. This stops Apache looking for a .htaccess file in your site folder, and the folder above that and above that and so on. A .htaccess also has to be parsed each request, whereas a virtual host only needs to be parsed whenever the server is restarted.

- Try not to use concurrent AJAX requests. PHP locks the session file, so will only process one request/session at a time. That means AJAX requests need to wait for the ones before it to finish before being handled. Wed, 17 Oct 2012 17:34:01 +1300 Simon http://www.silverstripe.org/how-to-improve-website-performance/#PageComment_10575