Slow Site, need help understanding Cache options

I have a site that is moving very very slow. http://buysellrentchicago.com/buildings.html This is especially true on pages where there are a lot of database calls. My hosting company told me that my pages aren't being cached and that's the problem. But I was under the assumption that MOdx caches all resources that have the "cacheable" box checked under settings. Is that not right?

I read modx documentation on cacheing but it was way over my head. As I started to look around I became even more confused. What are best practices when setting cache options in MODX? Is there a really great package I should be using? I really need to speed this site up and would greatly appreciate being pointed in the right direction.

The "cacheable" box tells MODX that you want this resource cached, and it does exactly that. But in your case, I think the snippet calls are uncached, which could be by ignorance that the developer of the site did not turn on caching of the snippets upon making site live or by necessity where the snippet has to be uncached to function properly.

I would start looking at the template for that page and see how many snippet calls are there and if they are cached or not. For example:

Cached snippet call will look like this: [[snippetname? &parameter1=`value`]]
Uncached snippet call will look like this: [[!snippetname? &parameter1=`value`]]

Notice the exclamation sign, [[snippet... vs [[!snippet... ? The exclamation sign is telling MODX to run the code "uncached".

Ideally the snippets should be cached, but most of the pages on the website built by looking at various data points which change with user's interaction. So there are instances where it is necessary to run the code uncached because it needs to load the stuff dynamically in each request. A quick example would be paginated list of news items, you know the page1, page2, page3 etc.

This will go deep very quickly though, if you have developer at hand with you, you can call him/her and let them have a look or you can hire one of the MODX professionals.

I hope this helps.

There are so many things that can slow down a MODX site that it's difficult to list them all. Probably the most likely (besides uncached snippet calls -- BTW, any Wayfinder calls should be uncached [no exclamation point] unless the menus are customized for the individual user).

- lots of images, especially large ones
- getResources calls with TV filters or other complex conditions
- conditional output modifiers (tags that contain colons (:)

It might help if you post the Template and the Resource Content field for a particularly slow page.

Thanks for the explanation zi. That makes sense. There are not many snippets in the templates and the ones that are there are cached. So is way finder. There are a lot of getResources calls with TV filters like BobRay brought up.

If you can put timing tags in the template and then look at the times taken by page, it could help with some efforts.


After that I would suggest trying the new snippet from MODX Russian community which is looking better and faster than getResources, it is pdoTools. You can download it via Package Manager inside MODX manager. http://modx.com/extras/package/pdotools

This package has a snippet named pdoResources, and it is a replacement for getResources. In most cases you can simply replace with and it will just work. I think its worth a try and see if there is significant change in the load times.

+ on on Zi's suggestion of PdoTools.

If you really want speed, the best thing is to extend the modUser object. That allows you to put all the fields you now have in TVs into a custom database table.

Then, rather than getResources, you use a bit of custom code that pulls all the resources in a single query rather than the many queries getResources has to make for each collection. PdoTools is much faster, but it still needs to make multiple queries because of the way TVs are stored.

Here is one tool for doing that: http://bobsguides.com/classextender-class.html

you could also wrap the different snippet calls into Executioner from here: https://github.com/opengeek/executioner (usage: https://github.com/opengeek/executioner/tree/v1.0.0-beta/core/components/executioner/docs) and see which snippet calls are the main cause of the slowness...

Thanks, PdoTools is much faster, but the site is still dragging. I will use this instead of getResources in the future.Quote from: zaigham at May 27, 2014, 09:42 AM

If you can put timing tags in the template and then look at the times taken by page, it could help with some efforts.

<!--
Query Time: [^qt^]
Requests: [^q^]
PHP Exec: [^p^]
Total time: [^t^]
Source: [^s^]
-->

After that I would suggest trying the new snippet from MODX Russian community which is looking better and faster than getResources, it is pdoTools. You can download it via Package Manager inside MODX manager. http://modx.com/extras/package/pdotools

This package has a snippet named pdoResources, and it is a replacement for getResources. In most cases you can simply replace

[[getResources? &p=`1` ...]]

with

[[pdoResources? &p=`1` ...]]

and it will just work. I think its worth a try and see if there is significant change in the load times.

This seems very cool, but is a little over my head. I already have many TV fields that are used in various places throughout my site. These fields already have data. It seems like implementing this will loose that info because everything is moved to another database. Will it change the way the site operates on the front end templates, or in the modx manager? Sorry if this is a stupid question. Quote from: BobRay at May 27, 2014, 06:56 PM

+ on on Zi's suggestion of PdoTools.

If you really want speed, the best thing is to extend the modUser object. That allows you to put all the fields you now have in TVs into a custom database table.

Then, rather than getResources, you use a bit of custom code that pulls all the resources in a single query rather than the many queries getResources has to make for each collection. PdoTools is much faster, but it still needs to make multiple queries because of the way TVs are stored.

Here is one tool for doing that: http://bobsguides.com/classextender-class.html

Tip #1: Avoid or disable phpThumb Cache Manager. http://modx.com/blog/2014/05/29/seven-ways-to-make-modx-fly/