Hi there,
We have a site (www.digitaltveurope.net) that is a news site, approximately 12 articles are loaded per day. There are currenltly 110 pages of news on the site,. The issue we are having is that the site take ages to load, I timed it at 2 minutes this morning, looks like its reading all the articles then rendering. Once the site has loaded, page loading times are much more acceptable, but the initial loading time is unacceptable for our users.
We don't have this issue with any of our other sites in the system!
Is there anyway we can set the site only to look for the 10 most recent articles when first loading?
thanks.
What's your caching system looking like? On, Off?
Hi,
I had also been meaning to post around this issue. We too have a news site that uses an Asset-Listing page. It currently lists 300+ plus news items at 15 per page. Load time on this is about 20-30 seconds, even on our fastest broadband connections - way outside our acceptable limit.
I feel it is the Asset Listing that is slowing the performance - Standard Page & other system assets load quite quickly. (So it is not our design). All our Asset Listings demonstrate slow performance across the site.
What are some of the aspects of our system that we can look at to improve performance? What can we do to ensure quicker load times?
If you're sorting then that's going to slow things down a lot. Matrix has to go through every single asset and read in it's information to do the sorting. If you're sorting by a metadata field, that's even slower.
The solution here is to perhaps limit your asset listing to point to as few assets as possible. A lot of people create separate folders for year or month (that their news items go in). If you point the asset listing to the most specific folder you'll speed it up a lot.
If you can turn on "Direct links only" (by pointing the listing to the folder directly containing the news items), then you'll speed it up even more.
some good advice. thank you.
Yes, we are sorting by metadata field over a large number of assets. so this probably explains some of our response times.
i'm still impressed that Matrix can do what it does in 15-20 seconds, only problem is our website users don't quite share the same sentiment!
[quote]some good advice. thank you.
Yes, we are sorting by metadata field over a large number of assets. so this probably explains some of our response times.
i'm still impressed that Matrix can do what it does in 15-20 seconds, only problem is our website users don't quite share the same sentiment![/quote]
Upgrading to the latest 3.20 version will also help. Sorting by metadata was greatly optimised. If you are a Squiz Client, you could also have your system patched.
Caching is set to off, but correct me if I'm wrong, caching only helps with subsequent views of the pages, which are already fast enough due to database caching. We're worried about the initial views.
That's true, but there a few options in terms of caching a page when it's updated. From memory there are specific recache trigger options that can be fired when an asset is updated, or you could schedule them to run every night for example.
This is your best option. Personally, any asset listing should be cached.
Thanks all, some great advice there, we're soon to be upgrading to the latest version, so hopefully things will improve.
The person who originally built the site is no-longer with us, I'm still finding my way around this site, please could you give me a nudge in the right direction on where I can set up these triggers.
[quote]Thanks all, some great advice there, we're soon to be upgrading to the latest version, so hopefully things will improve.
The person who originally built the site is no-longer with us, I'm still finding my way around this site, please could you give me a nudge in the right direction on where I can set up these triggers.[/quote]
If you're running the SSV version of Matrix, add a Trigger as a child of "System Management" -> "Trigger Manager". Be specific with the condition (eg. Asset Updated, Asset Type: Asset Listing, Live assets only etc.), and set two actions, the first to "Clear Matrix Cache" and the second action to "Clear Squid Cache". Even if you don't have a Squid Proxy installed, you should be able to use the "repopulate" option on this action to add the page back into the cache once it's updated.
Unfortunately, this action doesn't seem available in the GPL version using the standard "Clear Cache" action. Another option is to wget or curl a specific set of URLs overnight, or, you could try some other sort of trigger action that interacts with an external script to clear the cache for the asset (using _recache), then grabs the latest copy. I believe _recache only clears the cache, so the second step of getting the page is necessary.
This suffix first clears the cache and then loads the page, thereby loading a new copy into the cache, so it would work fine in this case. Upgrading is a good idea as this suffix, and caching in general, have more features in newer versions an require less tricks.
Thats great, thanks you all very much for the advice.