Thanks to all for your contribution to the discussion last night. For anyone who was not there, we talked about and reviewed Syd JoomlaDay and workshops and made a few plans for next year.

Peter Bui then expanded on his Joomla optimisation/speed techniques - very interesting - and with help from the floor esp. Nicholas.

Some tips:
Set keep-alive off (Apache setting configurable in .htaccess)
Use LightTPD instead of Apache
Compress CSS and JS - see
-- Minify code.google.com/p/minify/ and
-- Joomla extension CssJsCompress extensions.joomla.org/extensions/site-management/cache/7350
Put images in a separate subdomain e.g. images.mydomain.com, to avoid the restrcitions on number of concurrent downloads
address joomla caching
set session handler = none in config file (avoid conflict on DB when many users)
replace Joomla copy of mootools with google API mootools (caching improvement)
use css sprites

Xmas dinner meeting will be second week in December, in a Thai restaurant in Newtown. Watch out for news shortly. All welcome as ever.