More advanced Joomla! Performance tweaks.

I have a love/hate relationship with Joomla!. It’s an awesome tool, it just sucks.

My biggest beef with it, is that it’s slow. It renders content on the fly, for every page load. This is cool, if we used some of the more interactive features, but we don’t, so it’s just wasted overhead.

Joomla! has built in caching which would help… in theory. It appears that we use modules **cough** widgetkit **cough** that are not compatible with the Joomla caching. I keep turning caching on in the name of speed, and it keeps getting turned off because the site breaks. !@#$%^&* This sucks even more because Joomla! turns off browser caching for some dumb reason when you turn off server caching. Server side and client side caching are coupled? #EPICFAIL

So, this means I need to look elsewhere to get more performance out of Joomla!…

It should be noted that I have Apache & MySQL configured and tuned fairly well as well as have APC opcode caching turned on with 512mb of memory which is about used up (I’d just bumped it to 740mb while writing this post).

Browser Caching

Heh, silly me. One of my Joomla! homepages is 70 files long. No joke. Some of it is Google analytics, some social bookmarking widgets, etc. Joomla! thinks that the world changes by the moment, so it doesn’t provide browser level caching for ANY of these files.

I manged to get the subsequent page loads down to 10 files for the homepage by turning on some browser caching by .htaccess.

AddType font/ttf .ttf AddType font/otf .otf AddType application/x-woff .woff AddType image/svg+xml .svg AddType application/vnd.ms-fontobject .eotAddType font/ttf .ttf AddType font/otf .otf AddType application/x-woff .woff AddType image/svg+xml .svg AddType application/vnd.ms-fontobject .eot <IfModule mod_expires.c> ExpiresActive On ExpiresDefault "access plus 1 year" ExpiresByType text/html "access plus 600 seconds" ExpiresByType image/gif "access plus 2 months" ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access plus 2 months" ExpiresByType image/png "access plus 2 months" ExpiresByType text/css "access plus 2 months" ExpiresByType text/javascript "access plus 2 months" ExpiresByType application/x-javascript "access plus 2 months" ExpiresByType image/ico "access plus 2 months" ExpiresByType font/ttf "access plus 1 years" ExpiresByType font/otf "access plus 1 years" ExpiresByType application/vnd.ms-fontobject "access plus 1 years" ExpiresByType application/x-woff "access plus 1 years"q ExpiresByType image/svg+xml "access plus 1 years" IfModule> <IfModule mod_headers.c> <FilesMatch "\.(ico|pdf|flv|jpg|jpeg|png|gif|js|css|swf|eot|woff|otf|ttf|svg)$"> Header set Cache-Control "max-age=290304000, public" </FilesMatch> IfModule> AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/vnd.ms-fontobject AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE font/ttf AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE font/otf AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE image/svg+xml

I’d based a lot of these .htaccess suggestions from here.

Apache mod_cache Caching

Another big thing I did was to have the Apache webserver cache my uncacheable-by-Joomla! pages.

Apache has the ability to cache content at the apache level – before PHP is even fired up. This feature really tickles my fancy.

So, I put some configs in my vhost.conf file, told PLESK to reload my configs, did a graceful restart of apache, and started testing…

Then I created the cache directory, chown-ed it over to apache, and chmod-ed it to 700 before the caching worked. I think. Maybe? The apache mod_cache module is quite quiet about what it’s doing.

There are a few juicy bits:

CacheIgnoreNoLastMod On – This tells the apache level caching to ignore the fact that Joomla! doesn’t want anything to cache it’s pages. We now have a server side cache!!!

CacheIgnoreHeaders Set-Cookie – This is very important. Without it, you risk session hijacking at your Apache level. **scary**

CacheIgnoreQueryString On – This works well if we have SEO URL pages, it ignores everything after the ? in the URL.

<IfModule mod_cache.c> <IfModule mod_disk_cache.c> CacheDefaultExpire 3600 CacheEnable disk / CacheDisable /administrator CacheRoot "/var/cache/httpd/" CacheDirLevels 2 CacheDirLength 1 CacheMaxFileSize 1000000 CacheMinFileSize 1 CacheIgnoreCacheControl Off # Allows browser refresh of the cache CacheIgnoreNoLastMod On # Ignores Joomlas caching instructions CacheIgnoreQueryString Off CacheLastModifiedFactor 0.1 CacheMaxExpire 86400 CacheStoreNoStore On CacheStorePrivate Off CacheIgnoreHeaders Set-Cookie </IfModule> </IfModule>

[Update 12/6] But Alas, deep URLs don’t seem to work. You only seem to get the content from the first loaded page of a submenu. The Cache is returning the wrong page! I looked high and low, and couldn’t find the issue in the context of Joomla! but it appears that Wordpess can have the same issue, so I just used that fix. It appears that mod_rewrite operates before mod_cache so a rewritten URL is what is getting pulled out of the cache. If the re_write rule just clobbers anything unknown to index.php, the cache will return the same results for multiple pages. A quick tweak of the .htaccess file cleared up the issue for me.

Change:

# internally rewrite the request to the index.php script RewriteRule .* index.php/ [L]

to:

# internally rewrite the request to the index.php script RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php/$1 [L]

Some references I used to create the above config can be found here, here, and here.

By turning the local browser cache off in Firefox using the webdeveloper tools and going to a deep content page that isn’t visited often – ensuring that I am the one who is generating the page for the first time, I can verify that I can slice over a second off of the load time for the base HTML file. I was going from an average of 1.6 seconds to generate a page in Joomla! to often under .4 seconds to serve that cached page.

[Update 12/6] I think it should also be pointed out that the mod_cache cache will grow forever unless htcacheclean is run periodically to clean it up.

Bella and legos

Bella was a good girl and got a present! I gave her some legos I’d gotten and saved for a ‘good girl’ present. We put a table together out of a mirror because it has a good rim.

I think she likes legos.

Here is a series of 3d stereoscopic photos. You can look at them cross-eyed if you want. Or not.

**It’s funny how growing up the defecatory habits of others becomes a big deal.

Linux CP command that creates new directories as needed

I am making note of this here as I had to tweak what I had found after a fairly long Google search.

This is a custom shell script function I added to my .bashrc to provide the copying of files with the ability to create new directories as needed.
I needed to merge several websites and copy image assets from one site into the other website.

function cpmkdir()
 {
 if [[ -z "$1" || -z "$2" ]]; then
 echo "Usage: cpmkdir SOURCE... DIRECTORY"
 return 1;
 fi
 mkdir -p $(dirname "$2")
 cp -ur "$1" "$2"
 }

This will try to create a directory based on the directory tree you are putting your file.
It will then copy that file in, not replacing it if it’s already there & newer.

Based on: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-software-2/cp-create-any-directories-necessary-to-open-the-destination-path-920501/#post4568625 .

Space blanket tarp tent.

I wanted to try to make a lighter tent then the 45lb monster that I own. It really sucks to hike it a mile into the woods.

3D image of my big tent. Look at it cross-eyed to see it in all it's cute little girl looking out glory — 3D image of my big tent. Look at it cross-eyed to see it in all it’s cute little girl looking out glory.

So I made a tarp tent. Out of space blankets. So I now have a space-tent?

I used two cheap 52.5 x 82.5 aluminized polyester blankets I finally found in stock locally. I taped them together with some clear 3M UV resistant duct tape I split lengthwise. (3M #2120)

Taping 2 space blankets together to make a tarp tent

I twisted lengths of the tape together to form the tie down loops.

The stress points got a bit of tape reinforcement.

The corners of the space blanket get tape tie-downs

I had to flour the tape loops so they didn’t stick to the sheets so much.

A dish of flour to de-stick the rolled tape.

The final product is very light and rolls up very small.

I think I need to try it out soon. I also will let my 2-year-old play with it to stress test it.

The inspiration for this tent came from http://www.csm.ornl.gov/~geist/Philmont/2-man-shelter.pdf .

Walking stick shelter.

A 3d photo (look at it crossed eyed for the 3d effect) of the bits I used to make my silent space blanket carrier.

I have spent some time camping this summer. A few trips have been ultra lite trips. I use those space blankets as my blanket for the night.

They suck.

But they are light and cheap. And they are very noisy. Very noisy. Noisy to sleep under and noisy to pack back up and noisy to carry once you’ve opened them.

I think I found a solution to the noisy carry problem. Roll it around a stick and wrap it up tight.

Rolled the space blanket (This one has tape die downs on it) around the stick.

I grabbed my walking stick for testing my idea.

I wrapped cordage around the blanket tightly.

I used some paracord that is about the same color as my stick .

Unopened space blanket compared to the wrapped blanket.

There is a whole Mylar space blanket with tie down loops I added to it wrapped around this stick. I like the idea even though it adds a lot of weight to the stick.