DJ Says...

in Jollyville today.

I take back my earlier statement that I can't optimize this site because of the hard drive bottleneck. Wrong.

Thanks to this free web optimizer, I've already cut the total bytes for the home page from 614k to 468k, about a 24% decrease in bandwidth requirements.

I've also enabled Joomla's caching. Normally, I wouldn't do that because I'm used to high traffic sites. But let's face it, this page isn't high traffic. So, I've got it set to cache every 15 minutes, which should accomodate all of the traffic here. I'd be surprised if it didn't. I'm down from a high of about 4,000 views a day to less than 2,000 because I stopped updating for awhile. And the Google search bot punishes you severly for that! ;-)

And the last thing I've done takes advantage of the extra horsepower under the hood. I've enabled gzip so that every page gets compressed before it is served to the user. Now, if I had the reverse situation, no cpu horsepower and high disk throughput, that wouldn't make sense but in this case, it does.

And one last thing, related to the vps, I increased the memory limits from 384/768 full time/burst to 512/1024.

Bottom line? First page load speeds early this morning from this box were averaging 68 seconds. They are now averaging 27 seconds, an decrease of almost 2/3's. Not bad. More to do but that helps my attitude!

Of course, YMMV.