Joomla 3.2 seems quite slow: 5-6 seconds per page request, just to get the server started with an answer. Ways to increase response time?

Question

So the times you see is an example of typical development. You fire up your server and mysql database, then login to the backend and try to add a simple thing like a menu item.

The times shown are only for the server to start responding, not for the page to actually finish loading. So this is time, passing on the server in the code, executing queries etc. All the JS files and CSS is not part of this measurement.

I can keep going. Clicking on "New Menu Item" and Hitting "Save" will take just as long. So for a simple thing like adding a menu item the user spends roughly a minute looking at a blank screen (assuming the user knows joomla by heart and makes no wrong clicks and thus never has to go back).

Caching

So I read about caching. If you enable Page Caching I cannot keep developing because it seems my changes are not getting refreshed, and you really want this feature when you develop. The View Caching actually speeds up the backend and the frontend a lot. But you still have to access the page once slowly before it gets cashed, and you have to access it again in the timeframe of the existence of the cash to profit from it. So for me, this means the backend is basically always slow. Unless I try to do something like adding 10 menu items within 15 minutes.

I btw run on a brand new notebook which really should not be the problem.

Is there something I am missing out on?

Is this actually normal?

EDIT

I could improve my times to around 2 seconds. The profile shows a lot of red colors though, someone has an idea? The picture is for the view menu manager, main menu menu items.

Answer 1

I don't have a particularly good local machine (just a cheap W8 and using EasyPHP) and my times are all much faster than wither yours or those other people are reporting. One of the things you can do is turn on debug and look at the profiling data. When I load the admin login page even with debug on I can see it's onAfterDispatch which is the slowest part of the process. A lot of times upgrading MySQL will give massive speed improvements.

Answer 2

My times are all below 2 seconds, usually approx 1 both on my development server (a VM running CentOS 6 in virtualbox hosted by a Win7, i7 / 6Gb RAM / SSD disk) and my production server (Xeon dual 2GHz / 4Gb / 10000 rpm SATA disks).

Enable the debug for your site and see in the bottom of the page the times each module / component / event takes to run, this will make it possible to determine if it's a single extension / piece of Joomla eating up all the time, or it's just your machine.

Answer 3

When working on a localhost, the loading time usually depend on the PC performance. I work a hellish amount of time using wampserver (localhost) at work and on my computer at home.

When installing a fresh copy of Joomla 3.2 on Wamp at home, the step to create the database and insert the default content takes around 7-9 seconds, where as at work, it literally takes under 2 seconds. The reason? Because my work computer performance is much better than my personal computer.

It's the same concept for loading pages in the backend.

Hope this bit of info helped you.