Major Performance issues

[puneetjain87]

I am using Joomla 1.7.3

Whenever I clear my cache, my website goes down for 5-10 minutes, I see 500 internal server errors.
My webhost say that after I do this suddenly the server load shoots up resulting in the error and hence nobody can access my website during that time.

I initially thought, it was joomla cache plugin, so I disabled joomla cache and then used jotcache, but nothing was changed. Then I decided to delete cache manually from file manager, this time also the result was same.

Apart from this, the First byte time is too high, some times it takes upto 22 seconds.

A few days back I was on Joomla 1.5 on the same server and never had any such issues.

Any help in this regard will be highly appreciated.

[kina]

Agree about first byte time; yes 20 seconds sometimes!

Joomla 1.5 was indeed faster; so I wont't be 'upgrading' those.

[puneetjain87]

I hope somebody from Joomla Team sees this and resolve this issue asap.

[kina]

Spent the entire weekend on this.

On my server, using gzip was a major time waster so try with tha set to off. There's also an image called that is missing which causes a delay.

The Joomla cache system is abominable so I replaced that with a custom solution.

Now things were moving much better; but still slow. So I went to work gutting a fair bit of core code and finally it is not too bad.

Ultimately, Joomla is not geared towards performance - obviously the developers try not to let it get too bad but performance is not their primary goal. Performance requires a completely different architecture. I made a CMS from scratch to prove the point and it wipes the floor with Joomla, but it doesn't have the same range of features or 'nice' (as some claim) control panel. A custom CMS is quicker than optimising Joomla, if you know what you're doing. And that was without any frameworks as I wanted no compromises.

In short, the quick way to get better performance is to migrate down to Joomla 1.5. Around twice as fast.

[puneetjain87]

I spent a week in moving form 1.5 to 1.7 and it was too much of work, can't migrate back.

I used custom cache component jotcache, but results were same. Whenever I manually clear the cache, the website does not load as it increase too much load on my servers. It goes down and then starts working after 15-20 minutes.

[kina]

Just to be a little more clear.

By tidying up (repeat several times) and removing some features I had my 1.6 site almost as fast as with caching. My caching, that is. I find that J caching is so bad that it will slow sown a site after a little while and can cause other wierdness.

My video based site has tens of megabites per page (100s of images) but that runs on J1.5 (cut down) and is the fastest, despite the huge load and http requests.

If you don't really need the extra stuff in 1.6/1.7, and you're getting nowhere fast and looking for better performance, then J1.5 is the answer. Start fresh with a new install - WITHOUT the sample data.

[berlanda]

Guys,

When you mention Joomla cache, do you mention based file only, or are you also including mem_cached and xcache based?

Thanks

[tdandalairo]

Yes stay with J1.6 or less. J1.7x is very very bad. I'm very upset about it.
Very slow. If you are new to Joomla, RUN away!!! go find another CMS.

If you stuck with Joomla, stay with older versions.

I even bought a new hosting service from HostGator to see it it is godaddy problem. I found: Hostgator is liiiiittle faster, but it is definitely Joomla 1.7x issue.