Using output filters and modifiers too much?

I'm in the process of building a fairly complex site for a client, and the site looks fantastic. The issue is that it is running EXTREMELY slow. We're talking occasional 20 second page load times.

My question here is that currently, I'm using a fairly complex template for almost all of my resources, and this template has a pretty significant use of output filters/modifiers to modify the content on the fly instead of relying on a large number of different templates. Will this bog down a budget server (Bluehost) to the point that I'm seeing, or should I look elsewhere for the source of the slowdown?

On a parallel topic, should I consider switching to a dedicated server to allow for more resources to render the pages, or would this make no difference in page load speed at all?

That will indeed slow things down. I, too, used to make it a matter of pride to use as few templates as possible. These days I find it's much better to use a reasonable number of templates (with chunks to handle the common bits like the main menu and logo and footer areas) to avoid too much processing.

Another thing to look at is your "looping" snippets like getResources and Wayfinder. Whenever possible, these should be called cached. You also might want to look into a plugin I recall reading about recently that will re-load the whole set of page caches automatically when it's cleared, so that editing and saving one resource won't cause every page in the site to have to be re-generated on first request, which if you are busy in the Manager can cause your site to slow to a crawl.

I released an extra called RefreshCache that refreshes the whole site cache by crawling the site with cURL, but it isn't very practical because it takes forever to run.

I do the same thing with many sites. One thing that will absolutely kill your load times is if you're using getResources and the template chunk your pushing things through has a bogus image URL. For some reason getResources absolutely chokes on bad image paths.

@designcouch - great question - have been thinking the same recently.

On a recent project, I think I broke a new personal record of 3 templates (homepage, grid and text template).

All templates used output modifiers and IF calls using the IF call addon. I've noticed no performance drop, but this may be because i'm using MODX Cloud.

Like @sottwell said, it is almost pride (from my perspective convenience to have a smaller number of templates to maintain), but I have found myself creating duplicate templates and un-doing work to get around Revo Form Customization bugs (contraint fields don't work) which seems a great shame considering the bug has been around for almost a year or so.

My portfolio site was very very slow (uses lots of complex calls and if statements which I'm sure could of been optimised better)...

I used http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/ to help analise the performance of my portfolio site (was really really slow) and eventually moved it across to modxcloud.com and integrated it with cloudflare.com CDN. The result was my site loading up almost 4 times quicker than before.

Cloudflare.com is certainly worth a look. [ed. note: jonleverrier last edited this post 13 years, 8 months ago.]

thanks jonleverrier - great stuff. Are you aware that IF is no longer necessary? Output Filters and Modifiers add that functionality into the core of MODX.

I've used Pingdom's tools for a while now - they're quite handy!

Definitely a fan of CDNs in general, as they make thinks nice and snappy.

On the note of my own personal issue, it appears that Bluehost is throttling MySQL due to some slow queries. I'll most likely be starting a new thread for that, but before I do, has anyone run up against anything like this?

@designcouch: In Revo, the If snippet was added because it's faster and less resource-intensive than output modifiers.

@bobray - good to know, I removed some IF statements in favour of inbuilt output modifiers. Might just change them back now Am I right in thinking, that there are some things output modifiers simply cannot do, that IF statements can?

@bobray - had no clue that was the case. I'm in the same situation as @jonlevierrier; I removed a lot of If statements in favor of using the core functionality. Perhaps a re-thinking is in order!

1st win for IF statements, is you can nest them inside snippet calls. For example: