Joomla / Varnish / CDN

Thanks so much for this great resource. I have several joomla sites and looking to make them run as fast as possible and keep them going that way.

Most of my sites are built in joomla and recently I have been adding the images to a CDN (cachefly) and just a few days ago I moved up to a hostgator VPS and installed Varnish.

The speed seems to be going pretty well.

I am still working to understand how to interpret all of the different test results and if something can be improved.

http://www.webpagetest.org/result/110609_02_SR2X/

If the above site was yours what would you do next to improve performance?

Thanks so much! I am continuing to read the forum posts and learning as much as I can.

I ran a test with more runs just to make sure you don’t focus one one test result and happen to catch an outlier: http://www.webpagetest.org/result/110609_YR_SR6A/

The main thing that jumps out at me is the images. It looks like there are a lot of icon graphics as individual images: http://www.webpagetest.org/pageimages.php?test=110609_YR_SR6A&run=2&cached= Combining as many of those into individual sprites as possible will help quite a bit. Another option would be to use data URI’s but then you have to have browser-specific logic.

Since you’re running on a VPS, have you considered installing mod_pagespeed? It should be able to combine your css files and inline the small images as data URI’s automatically.