That leaves the first byte time which is really painful at 4 seconds. That’s largely a function of the performance of your serving infrastructure (database in particular) and if you’re on shared hosting you are going to be suffering. You can make it better by enabling the global caching which will help hide the issue. I don’t understand why that would impact the articles not going up on time, when a new article is published it should invalidate the cache and re-build it.
The reason why I cannot use Global Joomla caching is because we post new articles every 10 minutes. I haven’t found a way to have those articles display unless we clear cache. If we don’t clear the cache, the we don’t see any new modifications on the main page.
Looks like you still need to install and configure mod_expires. This caches stuff in the client browser so they don’t have to re-load stuff - and that will mean that once css, jss, images etc are downloaded once, the site will speed up dramatically for the users.
Do you have an opcode cacher enabled? If not, look at installing eAccelerator.
I wanted to make sure it was a good idea to put the mod_expires in my .htacess? Reason I ask is because my website is a news driven website. The news articles are updated by the minute. We have over 50 new news updates per day.
To answer your second question, I have ACP installed. Using File caching option in Joomla and Global caching turned off.
Your HTML should not get cached with mod_expores but you should make sure your static content is. The css, javascript and images should not change every time you publish a new story.
For TTFB you’ll need to look at what’s going on during page generation but it’s probably down to the efficiency of the DB queries - look for the slow queries in mysql
I’d spend more time preparing images for the site, compressing them better. Mod_expires seems to be running fine - you’re caching all you’ve got control over.
Now you need to tune your server… opcode cacher, database configuration, maybe a swap to nginx / php-fpm???
I finally got an A for First Byte, but not the right solution.
I have Joomla caching turned off and using APC caching. It’s slightly slow and it gives an F for First Byte.
**If I enable Joomla caching, it goes VERY FAST and I get an A.
The problem is, when I post news article, I cannot view them right away until the cache clears. I need to have my article show up right away, while using Joomla cahe or else I have to settle for APC caching.
That sort of implies that the Joomla! caching you’re using is pre-creating the pages in some way. I find it hard to understand that the inbuilt cache is incapable of automatically refreshing on content update (true!), or that there’s no way that you can manually refresh it as a last resort (Tools → Clean Cache).
According to the Joomla! docs, there are a number of engines that you can use… APC, Eaccelorator, File, Memcache, XCache. Which are you set up with?
I am using APC caching. That shows the updates instantly.
But if I use Joomla “File” caching, I need to clear cache to view updates. We cannot clear cache 50 times daily, it defeats the purpose of caching. I tried the cleancache addon that auto cleans on submission, but that’s not a good solution at all.
Yes you’re right, it’s hard to understand that the inbuilt cache is incapable of refreshing the content automatically.