Joomla Tips #1 : Turning On Caching

Home

Help & Tips

Joomla Help & Tips

Written by Editor (cowboy)

Wednesday, 05 October 2005

To improve your Joomla website's performance, just turn on "caching" on the "Cache" tab from Joomla's Global Configuration. When caching is turned on, Joomla creates a static file or "cache" of your website data on the disk. When the static file is found, the system retrieves the data from the disk rather than from the database. This improves performance because it saves system resources by not making redundant SQL calls to the database. And it will also speed up the display time of the pages.

You can set cache refresh rate in seconds. If you don't constantly update your contents, you might want to set it longer. And to further improve it, go to all your modules configuration and select "yes" to cache option (not available in all modules).

Steps:

Click Global Configuration

Click Cache Tab

For Modules: Choose Yes To Caching

Submit your own help & tips!

Comments (2)

... : redtreesystems : http://www.redtreesystems.com

While this was helpful, we were still a bit put off that there was no local caching going on. We were able to overcome this problem by hacking index.php a bit.

The first item of business is to get rid of the section near initGzip() that says:

header( 'Expires: Mon, 26 Jul 1997 05:00:00 GMT' );
header( 'Last-Modified: ' . gmdate( 'D, d M Y H:i:s' ) . ' GMT' );
header( 'Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate' );
header( 'Cache-Control: post-check=0, pre-check=0', false );
header( 'Pragma: no-cache' );

This code ensures no browser will attempt to cache your site. This really affects bandwidth!

Next in line was to implement a check if any of the database tables have been updated (except jos_session). If the client sends an If-Modified-Since header that is prior to our maximum database modification, we can safely return a 304 - not modified.

Finally, we implemented a simple Caching class that saves each REQUEST_URI seperatly. Components search, and some of our custom ones were intentionally left out, for various reasons.

You can check out the result for yourself by going to http://www.redtreesystems.com. Click around a bit. Fast, yeah? But here's the real treat:

curl -H "If-Modified-Since: Fri, 07 Oct 2005 02:34:50 GMT" -i http://www.redtreesystems.com />
Returns:
HTTP/1.1 304 Not Modified
images/grin.gif