I have set up a testsite using Xoops, and I am a bit concerned about the (lack of) speed of the site. I would like some general recommendations on how to improve this. I see that the official Xoops-site is far faster than the testsite of mine, despite its far greater complexity.

Does Xoops-powered sites get slower as more modules are installed, or is other factors (such as server capacity and bandwidth) more significant?

I recommend you read my post in the thread Xoops Trafic Performance

Aha, this is one of my favourite subjects . There are four major things that will dictact your sites performance;

1) Pure Server Grunt. Moderately important, but for the most part can be overcome with careful planning and configuration of the caching system for modules and blocks.

2) Content. Quite important to keep your front page of your site to only the essentials and should ideally be keep at under 100k.

3) HTTP Requests. Very important to keep this as low as possible as each request requires that the server and client

4) Internet connection. Extremely important to have ample available bandwidth for your website. Remember available bandwidth is only equal to that of the slowest link between your server and client. For people still using standard analog modems this is going to be a maximum of 56kbps, which is why it is a very good idea to minimize HTTP requests and content as these have a VERY large influence on how your site performs for these users.

With you Internet connection it is not only available bandwidth you have to consider, but also the connections relativity to the Internet backbone. This can be determined by a trace route. Basically, the closer to the backbone you are the better your site will perform as each hop introduces latency. This isn't so important for local users, but for international users this can have quite an effect on site performance.


THE most useful tool I use for trying to optmise my site is IBM Page Detailer Basic which is a freeware application from IBM (duh!). What it does is connects to your Internet Explorer browser and displays statistics in a graphical form of how long each HTTP request in your website takes to download, and how much data is contained in each. It also shows you things like respnse times which is a great indicator for latency or server lag. Hope this helps a bit .

The initial respons from the site is what seem to take most time (usually about 15 secs), once it's loaded the response time when change pages in different modules is quite acceptable. So I am starting to assume that some time-consuming processes (initialization?) takes place in all installed modules before the frontpage is shown. Is this correct?

possibly you have a block on your front page that is slowing down the display. Likely suspects would be the headlines block (as it has to request each feed when out of date), the waiting contents block (as it has to make several sql queries to gather its summary records). You should turn on MySQL / block debugging. This will display every sql query needed to render your page, as well as every block loaded. At the bottom of this debugging window will be an elapsed time, turn off some of the more "heavy" blocks and compare the elapsed time until you can narrow down the culprit.

Ok, I'll try that. Thanks a lot for your quick and helpful response.