Best Caching and Performance Setup?

This is an open question. I'm keen to know what the best performance and caching setup for Revolution is.

I've read a lot of stuff and it's all pretty open ended as in "You could do this or you could do that, the choice is up to you."

Well, I don't want a choice. (That's kinda a joke for all you Modx junkies.)

I just want to be told what the best setup is (and don't say cloud, 'cos for some of us it just ain't the best.)

The list of plugins seems endless, and therefore ultimately confusing as to what will work with what and what is redundant.

We have
getcache
MinifyX
Various versions of pThumb
Cloudflare integration
SmartOptimizer
StatCahce
SuperCache

Which is best and do they all play nice with each other?

Then we have system settings, htaccess stuff and server options. Aye, aye aye!

Perhaps someone could suggest a base setup and then we could progress to an ultimate setup.

Some of us aren't coders or tech's so we do just need to be told:

"Do this, don't do that, and put that here not there, don't touch that and get that thing out of your mouth."

I await your orders.






[ed. note: markg last edited this post 9 years ago.]

Hi MarkG,

I'm sure you'll appreciate that a specific answer to this question doesn't really exist...the sheer number of variables involved across any project (visitors/your team/your tools/your budget/the project - code, etc...)

All I would recommend is that you start simple - make use of ModX's caching and a service like AWS S3 and CloudFront.

With those two things you would then want to get tracking/analysing (I generally use Linode longview and the network tab in web tools) - what are you trying to optimise for? What's your budget?

Only when you have data and a real objective can you begin to layer in new optimisations (from software optimisation through to full blown caching servers)...the possibilities and therefore the answers are completely unique to you.

Ok, this doesn't answer your question....

TLDR; Start small and layer in new optimisation software/hardware as needed.

Thanks Matt,

I'm sure you'll appreciate that a specific answer to this question doesn't really exist

Yeh, that's why I made this a discussion post rather than a direct question.

I feel it would be a useful discussion for the Modx community to have.

I'm interested in what other people have done.

Perhaps, as I suggested, we could get people to share what they've done from a basic setup to an optimum setup.

For my own site-

I'm already using the Amazon services plus Couldflare CDN, as well as a minifying script for all css and JS.

My scores on Pagespeed and Yslow are up around 94% (So I shouldn't really complain).

My main issue now is time to first byte which makes up more than half of my total load time.

And that's where things get interesting.

But that's just me.

As I said, I'd really like this to be an open discussion on what people have done and also what challenges people are facing.

The main question is why you need more speed.

If you just wan`t to shine in Google Pagespeed, you are already fine.

But if you got have an high traffic, high speed website the work is much more. Especially the rebuild of the cache slows your performance usually massively.

A main part of an fast cache rebuilding is using caching mechanism that use their cache for more then one resource. We often use getCache with an Custom CacheElementKey to render the Footer, Menus and other parts just a very few times for then entire website.

We also build an extension for Contentblocks that crops thumbnails on saving in the manager, instead of the first call.

A good start of optimizing the load speed are the caching files of MODX. With some basic PHP knowledge, open core/cache/resource/web/resources/XXX.cache.php and find the '_content' block. And read through, look at all snippet calls that are still in there. Think about if this one is really needed to be executed each call.
Also never set placeholders inside chunks and templates slow down the rendering process of your Page.

The next big slow down are Output Filters inside an very often called chunk. We got just yesterday an chunk rendering rows of an trader search. Inside this chunk were 3 if conditions, changing an classes. This conditions only increased the page load when by about 5 sec. hitting 600 Traders

Thanks Michael,

all good and that's exactly the type of input I was hoping to gather.

I'll work thru your suggestions, but in my case I don't think it's actually Modx that's the problem.

Even though I've got high scores, the pages are still taking 2 - 4 seconds to load. And half of that is time to first byte, which is really nothing to do with Modx. Plus I have a pretty good idea as to what the particular culprits are.

If you're really after speed:

- Never use output modifiers
- Never call getResources, especially if there are TV filters involved
- Never use TVs for anything that will be displayed, or for searches
- Use sprites for images that will be displayed on the same page
- Don't nest things unless you have to - the fewer tags that need processing, the better

You'll be giving up a lot of convenience and maintainability, but if page-load speed is important enough, it may be worth it.

Thanks Bob,

All good tips.

I'd really like to open this discussion up to what other people have done to speed up their Modx sites or the problems they are facing, rather than focus on my particular issue.

Extreme websites:
Translate this to english http://habrahabr.ru/post/253737/

Big websites:
What's already been said above +
Mark Hamstra has a good article: http://forums.modx.com/thread/19964/caching-strategy-101?page=2#dis-post-401549 [ed. note: mrhaw last edited this post 9 years ago.]