Well, our meeting last night was a bit freeform, but REALLY interesting. Thanks to Nicholas, Audra and all for many insights....

One discussion in particular I must report back on...

Joomla 1.5 performance:

We timed the frontend and backend of one of my client's test sites test.afmw.org.au using Firebug.

Notably, the article editor window in the backend took:
7s to come up with no WYSIWYG editor,
12s with FCK (less icon images to load) and
30+s with either TinyMCE or JCE editor

It turned out to be taking so long for the last two due to 17s worth of icons and other images it was trying to load, plus 77k mootools.js and substantial image and css load times form the template.

Today I popped on Query Cache extensions.joomla.org/component/option,c...k_id,3180/Itemid,35/
and also read these performance tips:
www.joomlaperformance.com/articles/perfo..._up_joomla_3_14.html

After loading query cache, and truning on Joomla's own page cache, my load times for the front end dropped 60%. Backend - unchanged. So I reverted to TinyMCE and added Linkr for easier linking to articles.

This does not improve my backend load times, and does not solve my image load difficulty, but it was an interesting exercise.

I am now going to hack out the bits of mootools.js that I dont need. I could also optimise images in my template and consolidate the CSS files.

Might report back if anything helpful turns up. You got tips yourself?

A good set of rules to follow when tryng to speed up a page:
developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html

That was interesting. Some things you can work on within the template itself. Useful - thanks

Ok, I'm like a dog with a rat, or whatever the expression is. I cant leave this one alone...

Further research reveals that:

(a) a dedicated virtual server containing only a copy of this site, with a leading host in the U.S, is NOT faster than Rochen's shared hosting

(b) I've found BOLT - a new slimline fast-loading template from alledia.com that i've loaded on to this site for testing purposes. I created an exact copy of joomladay.org.au home page and timed the existing template against Bolt. Findings are:

Using ja_purity (the template used on this site):

Average load time: 14.09 seconds
HTML: 172ms
CSS: 2.65s
SCRIPT: 8.32s
IMAGES: 6.25s (33 images, including 3 content images)

Using Bolt with Joomla's native Javascript turned ON:

Average load time: 7.93s
HTML: 203ms
CSS: 484ms
SCRIPT: 6.18s (it's running compressed)
IMAGES: 2.35s (8 images)

Bolt with Javascript turned OFF: average load time: 3.76s

Bolt is (on the plus side) standards compliant, fast and SEO optimised. It comes with colour choices and the ability to turn Javascript on or off (you may need it for your extensions). On the downside, it's ugly. It has slightly less features than some commercial templates, but has several types of menu.

a firebug extension based on the rules from yahoo:
developer.yahoo.com/yslow/

I started to write some code that I am going to use on my site to combine multiple css/js files so that I can try to reduce the number to 1 of each. It will also get rid of the extra white space using the code from:
code.google.com/p/minify/

I can show you at the next meeting

Great - that would be good, thanks.

By the way, I loaded Yslow a while ago and found that (like Firebug) it was dragging down my loads of pages even when I didn't want to use it. So I un-installed it. A slight over-reaction perhaps, but from my perspective the info it provided also wasn't quite what I was looking for.

Now I've begun using Firebug and also tools.pingdom.com. Which admittedly is in America.

I am running a beta of firebug, 1.3.0b1 .. it lets me choose what to enable per site, so when I do not want to use it it is not meant to slow things down.

Tho on the other hand I have been running firebug so long I might not notice that it is slowing things down.