This week has seen continued drama surrounding the website WikiLeaks and it’s head Julian Assange. Behind the scenes, a cyber war is being fought by opponents and defenders of the site.
Various providers of services to WikiLeaks, including hosting companies, dns providers, payment gateways and others have withdrawn service over the last 2 weeks. This action prompted a furious backlash against their websites by angry supporters of WikiLeaks.
Most providers who withdrew services cited breaches of their terms and conditions in one way or another – some technical, some not. Paypal said “…our payment service cannot be used for any activities that encourage, promote, facilitate or instruct others to engage in illegal activity. We’ve notified the account holder of this action.” Others were subject to denial of service attacks. Few, if any, have stated their action was as a response to US governement pressure.
As quickly as providers have halted services, website mirrors and new domain names have sprung up around the world. Meanwhile supporters of the site have set up retaliatory attacks on providers who withdrew services. Mastercard and Visa have both seen outages on their website in the last few days. One such group , Operation Payback, even advocates a mass faxing campaign to tie up communications at companies such as Amazon, MasterCard, Moneybookers, PayPal, Visa and Tableau Software.
For web hosts, it’s time to take a good look at the terms and conditions of service. French host OVH is all over the news this week because of its decision to request a judicial review of its responsibility associated with removing WikiLeaks from its servers, and to continue hosting the site until that review is complete. A survey by WHIR of hosters makes interesting reading – hosts were split 50/50 on whether they would host WikiLeaks at all.
This part of our performance tips series looks at Joomla based websites and what you can do to get the fastest possible loading times.
So why are loading times important? Recent research by Forrester Research on behalf of Akamai has identified two seconds as the new threshold for acceptable web page response times. With so much choice available on the internet, users just won’t put up with a slow loading page. They’ll hit the back button and go elsewhere. You’ve not only lost a visitor but your brand has been damaged.
Measure, Adjust and Test
Obviously there are complicated and expensive tools available that will test your site from many different locations and produce detailed reports, but free tools like YSlow and Firebug will show you load time reports in your browser. In this article we’ll be looking at Page Speed, a recently released extension for Firefox by Google.
Establish a base line speed for a number of pages on your site – try to pick a variety of styles including the home page, and any other popular landing pages. Make a note of the page loading times of some of your competitors websites, so you can benchmark yourself.
If you’re not happy with the results, now it’s time to start making changes!
Joomla Tweaks
1 – Enable Cache
Cache Settings
Enable Joomla’s core content cache. From the Administrator login, go to Global Configuration->Cache and Enable. The standard option is File. Depending on your host’s server configuration there may be other options here. The built in Joomla system caches objects. Objects are things such as function calls, modules, content articles, etc. This speeds up the generation for all pages and all visitors. Where it will not help (much) is for pages that require a lot of dynamic content to be generated every time they are loaded.
2 – Enable Gzip Compression
Enable Compression
With this option enabled, the server compresses the page content created by Joomla before sending it to the browser in real-time. The browser then decompresses the content and displays it. The option is enabled in Global Configuration -> Server -> GZIP Page Compression. It’s important to note that not all servers support gzip compression – ask your host, or in Joomla look in Help -> System info. Most web sites gzip their HTML documents, but as a typical web page will have many non-HTML components such as images, CSS and Javascript. It’s therefore worthwhile to compress any text response including XML and JSON. Image and PDF files should not be gzipped because they are already compressed. More tips on compressing CSS and Javascript can be found here.
3 – Choose your template carefully
There are thousands of templates made for Joomla, and a lot of them look stunning, but many have some severe performance penalties. The problem is that some templates can use upwards of 70 separate images to display the page. Each image requires a separate HTTP request from the browser to the server and has to be downloaded. When testing, try your site under the default Joomla template and you’ll be amazed at the difference. Once you’ve chosen or designed your template, use the Page Speed extension to see if any images used by the template can be optimised further.
4 – Check your Extensions
The Joomla extensions directory contains components that can do just about anything and it’s fair to say most Joomla sites will use a couple at least. However it’s also a fact that some extensions are very inefficient and can slow your site dramatically. Fortunately you simply test if a component is causing problems by temporarily unpublishing it from your site and retesting in Firebug with Page Speed. If you do find a problem, you might be able to find another component that does the same thing.
5 – Optimise your Database
Joomla makes a lot of demands on the backend MySQL server. Regular optimization of your database can help keep things running smoothly. To optimize the tables go into phpMyAdmin (database administration tool), select all tables, and click “optimize”. To read more about optimizing the database tables, read this section from MySQL.
6 – Consider upgrading
It may be that your site has now been optimised as well as it can be, and although the page load speeds have improved, you want to take it to the next level. With 2020Media’s virtual server and dedicated server hosting plans, there is a smooth upgrade path. With complete control over the entire server environment, dedicated memory and CPU you can improve your Joomla performance over anything that would ever be possible on a shared hosting account.
Summary
In this article we’ve looked at why the performance of your website is important, how to test load times and be systematic about testing, and finally looked at some important Joomla performance tips. One thing to remember is that trying these tips is reversible – Some can hurt performance, but most of the time they does help. The only way to find out is to try it. If in doubt make a backup of your database before making each change.
Notes
The Joomla!® name is used under a limited license from Open Source Matters in the United States and other countries. 2020Media.com is not affiliated with or endorsed by Open Source Matters or the Joomla! Project.
TalkTalk and BT have won the right to get a judicial review of the controversial Digital Economy Act.
BT and TalkTalk argued that the legislation had been “rushed through parliament” before the election.
Internet service providers (ISPs) are unhappy with the part of the act that requires them to take action against suspected illegal file-sharers. The act also set out powers that could allow the government oversight over Nominet, the registry for .co.uk domain names.
During the parliamentary debate about the Digital Economy bill, held in the final days before the parliament was dissolved before May’s general election, some MPs complained that it needed more debate because of its complex nature. Andrew Heaney, director of strategy and regulation at TalkTalk said “only 6% of MPs attended the brief debate”.
A judge will conduct a full review in February, considering whether the parts of the act that deal with illegal file-sharing are in breach of the e-commerce directive, which rules that ISPs cannot be held liable for traffic on their networks.
The act will also be measured against EU privacy and technical standards legislation.
One of the most controversial elements of the law relates to tougher penalties for people who download music, films and other content without paying.
ISPs will be required to send notices to people identified as net pirates, with persistent offenders being added to a blacklist.
Vint Cerf, founding father of the internet, spoke yesterday at the first 6::UK conference to promote adoption of the next generation IPv6 IP addressing system.
2020Media was at the event and was pleased to find our preperations and progress are already well ahead of most of UK business.
2020Media published its plans for IPv6 last year here. It’s anticpated that all IPv4 addresses will be allocated from the central pool by summer 2011, so the 6::UK group aim to encourage all UK stakeholders to act now to be ready for the new addressing system.
Any broadband customer who’d like to start using IPv6 on their connection can do so right now, for free, using our free tunnelling service. Please contact us to request a tunnel.
One of the services that makes 2020Media special is performing migrations of existing websites from other web hosts. We’ll help with anything from a static HTML site to complex database driven CMS websites. Website migrations are not always needed – sometimes the customer has a full copy of their website and it’s straightforward for them to upload it and get going straight away.
But it’s not unusual for a customer to find themselves with a problem – their developer is no longer around or puts barriers up to the move, or the existing web host does everything in their power to hold their customer to ransom.
Often customers have been told by everyone they’ve spoken to that their web site can only be hosted or maintained by their current provider, and if they wish to move, they’ll have to start again from scratch. Put simply, this is not true in the majority of cases. Talk to 2020Media about your move, and we’ll give you free advice on what is and isn’t possible.
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