Comments on: Optimizing ExpressionEngine Sites for Minimum Load Times [Part 1]

By: Sean

Sean — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 12:54:07 +0000

Jack,
thanks for this great post – I’m coming to it a little late, but am definitely in need of this advice on the site I just launched this week. Will be optimizing now.

By: Jérôme Coupé

Jérôme Coupé — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 11:49:28 +0000

Thanks for the tips.

Episode 11 of Ryan Ierland’s excellent screencasts goes in depth about available caching options in ExpressionEngine.

http://www.pragprog.com/screencasts/v-riexp/building-a-dynamic-website-with-expressionengine

By: Tom Davies

Tom Davies — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 16:28:31 +0000

Hey Jack,

Great article – I use minify (http://code.google.com/p/minify/) to automate combining and compressing CSS + Javascript while keeping the organisational advantages of separate files for development and maintenance. It’s a dead easy install and automatically refreshes its caches when you edit a file – check it out.

keep up the good work!

By: Brian Klepper

Brian Klepper — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 03:56:07 +0000

Thanks for the info. I think I should double check my queries!

By: Jack McDade

Jack McDade — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 14:53:51 +0000

@Gareth If you’re talking about live, on the fly refreshing, no — it wouldn’t do that. But it’ll remove the cache so next time they view it, they’ll re-download the whole page rather than pull up the cache. Make sense?

By: Gareth du Plooy

Gareth du Plooy — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 14:43:43 +0000

This is very very helpful. I noticed with official EE documentation, they say for template caching that : “We call it Dynamic Page Caching because the system will clear itself automatically when certain events happen. For example, if you cache your comments page, when someone submits a comment, the cache will be cleared, momentarily overriding the normal caching preferences.”

If I have a EE template page that my client’s iPhone app hits with just the weblog results (no other html is returned), and I have the template cache set at say 1 minute, would posting a new article automatically refresh this template? I can’t seem to find answers to this anywhere!

THanks!

By: Jack McDade

Jack McDade — Tue, 26 May 2009 18:01:07 +0000

@Doug Interesting. I haven’t noticed the {if} statement being a big factor. I’ll have to run some benchmarks and see what level of increase you can get from cleaning them up.

By: Doug Avery

Doug Avery — Tue, 19 May 2009 22:34:47 +0000

Awesome overview, thanks!

We’ve also found that reducing the number of weblog tags on a page, even if they’re hidden behind a “if” statement, is key. These tags seem to request and render before the if statements process, meaning they can be a huge issue if you’re not paying attention.

By: Martin Luff

Martin Luff — Tue, 05 May 2009 22:46:35 +0000

Hi Jack

Great roundup there of the basics – thanks for that. Can’t wait for the follow-up For the CSS sprites there are some usful resources like http://spritegen.website-performance.org/ – generates the sprite and the CSS once you have the individual images all done and dusted…

Would be great to see something on performace impact of single templates with many embeds versus more templates few embeds, or more templates versus lots of {if:esleif } arguments…

Thanks again.