Joomla 1.1 performance tuning

Joomla performance can be tweaked in couple of ways. I will focus on the ones that are to be done within the joomla interface. I will not go into any mysql/apache performance tips, even though you might give those also a try. 

 How fast Joomla is depends on how many content items you have and how many (and which ones) extensions you run. 

If you happend to have thousands of pages full of content, your site will be slow. Or if you have to have that nifty autolinker mambot, but it makes so much overhead.

 Turn Off Stats and Error reporting

 You might not want all the stats Joomla gathers. If your site is not really busy (averaging over hit per second) you most propably won't notice any change, but you will save couple of database queries every time a page gets loaded.

Both settings can be altered at the admin in the site -> global configuration

Caching

Joomla supports native caching mechanism. To turn it on go to the Joomla admin page and choose global configuration from the site menu. Go to cache tab and make sure your cache directory exists and is writable by the webserver user.

Caching can be turned on at the site level and extension level.  Go to site modules and click on each module to see if caching can be turned on. All native modules support caching.

Even though some performance was gained, it did not meet my expectations.

Propably the best option I was able to find is to use third party extension. I tried a couple of them and recommend PageCache and JAccelerate.

They both support database and file caching. This gives you the advantage to chose between cpu usage (database) and disk usage (file) depending upon your scenario. PageCache is more complex,  but performance wise gave me worse results than JAccelerate.

JAccelerate is very straightforward. Only a few simple settings and off it goes. It changed my load times from 12-17 seconds per request to 2-3 seconds. The pages are generated in less then a second. 

PageCache offers more stats, caching exceptions, neat clear cache admin button (if you use PageCache, you will understand how often you use this feature), but the load times decreased to 6-9 seconds, which might not be enough for more impatient users.