Joomla! Discussion Forums

My hosting package, hosts website files on one server and database files on a different server. Dose this have a noticeable affect on performance of a Joomla site?

I would also like to know if anyone has tested Joomla’s performance for different server configurations or has any stats on this?

It depends on the connections between the two servers. If it is a slow connection, you'll notice a slowdown (probably a fairly large one, as Joomla runs quite a lot of queries to generate each page). If it is a fast connection, you'll probably be OK. A lot of hosting providers have gigabit links internally, which should be fast enough to avoid too much slowdown (there will be some, but not as much as if you were going over a normal *SDL link, which runs at a few megabits/second.
Top performance for small Joomla sites is achieved with the DB and webserver being on the same box. Larger sites benefit from having a separate DB server and caching most pages on the webserver to minimise database calls, but we are talking very large sites here, and, as the Joomla team have shown, you can run a huge number of visitors off a single server (all the Joomla.org sites are run off just 2 servers)

Do you have any performance stats on the joomla.org sites or other large Joomla sites, for example; average queries per page, database size, server configuration.

I don't, no. I've got nothing to do with the administration of any of the Joomla.org sites, and am just restating what they've said in the past.

I think, but don't have evidence at the moment (I did some caculations a few weeks ago, and we've launched another couple of sites since then, both of which have been getting a lot of publicity, and fairly steady visitor growth, so I've extrapolated), that we are doing an average of about 27 queries per page, which includes SEF resolution and some fairly query heavy custom components. Of course, it's an average, so some pages will have more (I know some of the custom components can make 30 or more queries per page - they pull a lot of data), but the majority will do less.
The database for the sites on the server (14 Joomla DBs, but they vary in the amount of content they hold) dumps to just over 10Mb of SQL files, and is a bit larger on the server because it has all the generated indices and so on.

The server runs on Apache 2.0.55, PHP 5.1.2 and MySQL 5.0.18, the caching is provided by APC 3.0.12p2 and the MySQL built in query cache. APC has 128Mb to play with, and the MySQL query cache is 50Mb (sounds small, but most of the cached queries are related to SEF URLs, so they don't need that much space). We serve about 99.8% of files from memory (according to APC), and about 25% of queries (it doesn't cache any queries involving dates, which all the custom components use heavily. I need to fix that, but until then, it keeps the page load times for most pages down)

Thank you mpettitt for the information you provided. I believe this type of information and statistics on performance which can be tested under a set of variables would prove useful for any one who is undergoing a systems analysis & design for a big joomla project.

I would like to suggest the start of a project for a Joomla Performance Index. This index will have a collection of information form users, developers and community members on Joomla’s performance in;

1- varying environments (LAN, WAN).
2- with different components
3- varying server configurations
4- with different number of users

Let me know what you think.