I don't know if its just me but does Dreamhost sites load slower

Setup Cache
Joomla's caching ability's are not enabled by default. You can enable caching by going to "Site" > "Global Configuration". The cache time is measured in seconds. 900 seconds (15 minutes) is the default. You can increase or decrease this time. Consider how often content is changed on your site then change this time accordingly. If your only updating your site's content once a day consider a 12 or 24 hour cache time. You can use this tool to convert seconds into hours or minutes.

Module Cache
Now that you have Joomla's cache enabled turn on caching on any of the modules you have published. Go to "Modules" then open any published modules and enable any caching it may have.

Disable Statistics
Joomlas statistics feature although usefull can slow down your site, most significantly when the browser requests its first page. If you have statistics enabled you can disable them in your administrator ("Site" > "Global Configuration") If your host keeps access files then you can still get your sites statistics through the access.log file with log analyzers. Chances are your host provides them if it keeps logs to begin with. Going this route statistics won't be on a per article basis like in Joomla, instead an aggregate of all your sites traffic. Another negative is that you won't have any logs of search strings either.

From: http://www.primakoala.com/tutorials/guides/speeding_up_joomla.html

 

wow. thanks that was a lot of good info.....


still with dreamhost....i dont think i have ever heard of a host having so much trouble

 

They were just down for me about an hour ago. Only lasted a couple of minutes.

 

On the subject of dreamhost speeds, a while back they switched everyone over from Apache's mod_php to php-cgi, which did cause slowdown but allows better tracking of CPU usage. I was quite annoyed till i realised that Dreamhost allows you to use fastcgi, and you can compile your own PHP executable with whatever options and extensions you like.

After configuring FastCGI/PHP and compiling the Advanced PHP Cache for caching PHP compiled bytecode, the result is a huge speedboost. Another strategy (which i don't know whether Dreamhost endorses) is running memcache , which allows you to cache data in memory rather than on the disk, allowing much faster access times.

If enough people are interested in this, I can attempt to write a tutorial detailing how to get it set up, it is quite tricky and there's quite a bit of shell usage involved.

 

man i would be very interested in learning about that. it does all sound greek to me but i am learning as fast as I can.


As far as joomla cache, one question, say i have the sites cashed for like 48 hours.....does that mean new content won't show up until that time period is up?