NYCPHP Meetup

[Mitch Pirtle]

On 8/19/07, Art Shectman <art at elephantventures.com> wrote:
> Please feel free to contact me off list if you are looking for Joomla or PHP
> work, or just want to kick the tires on what we're building.

This Thursday, make sure you attend the NYPHP meetup at The Delancey -
there will be the first NYC Joomla meet. I'm hoping to be there.

> Joomla isn't great with REALLY big numbers of pages and/or categories.

That's not entirely correct - Joomla is great at handling lots of
content and lots of categories, it is the admin interface that isn't
really suited for it (by default, that is).

Perhaps it is time to create a second Administrator Template that uses
a different method to display and browse long lists, as opposed to
monster dropdowns that kill your browser... :-)

> Things to look out for:
> I was using Joomla 1.0.11 a while back with OpenSEF.  I had a pile of issues
> with my site and the time it took for page loads with 20,000+ pages in my
> site.  I tracked it down to a faulty design in how the OpenSEF stuff was
> loading , caching (or failing to), and rewriting site friendly urls in my
> pages.  I posted some bug fixes on the OpenSEF site and I think the problem
> as been resolved.  What didn't get resolved, and I'm anxious to check out
> the 1.5 stuff to see if it has, is that when you are on the admin side of
> things, lots of categories means HUGE drop down lists.  One of my sites had
> 30K plus categories, and it rendered the admin inoperable as it was trying
> to load a category select list of 30K items on a bunch of the admin pages.
> One thing that helped my pages load MUCH faster was enabling query caching.
> With Joomla, sometimes with all your plugins, and 3rd party modules, you are
> using 'sub-optimal' code, and sometimes queries get run repeatedly on a
> page, or across a session.  With most sites, where content isn't really
> changing that much, turning on query caching in MySQL helped a bunch in
> speeding up page load times, especially with very large numbers of pages and
> categories.

There's quite a few things you can do to tune up a busy Joomla site,
and MySQL query caching is just the start.  An even bigger performance
increase can be found with PHP accelerators like XCache, APC and
eAccelerator. And when you go to 1.5, it's almost required as
everything is heavy on objects, and therefore gets the biggest boost
out of a cache and accelerator.

With memcached available in the 1.5 series, you can now cluster your
Joomla sites across many systems without too much effort.

*spacemonkey smells another article coming

And one quick note on the query cache - that's no good on community
style sites, as the tables are changing too rapidly for MySQL's cache
to be very effective. It is wicked fast on more typical,
corporate-style sites though.

-- Mitch