Hi all,

I'm currently running CMSMS 1.9.4.3 and I'm running it on a Linux Virtual Private Server. I'm currently using the following modules:
CMSMailer 2.0.1
FileManager 1.1.0
MenuManager 1.7.6
ModuleManager 1.4.2
News 2.11.4
nuSOAP 1.0.2
Printing 1.1.2
Search 1.6.10
ThemeManager 1.1.4
TinyMCE 2.8.4
FormBuilder 0.5.11
FormBrowser 0.2.3
FrontEndUsers 1.6.4
CustomContent 1.5.3
CGExtensions 1.17.9
CGFeedMaker 1.0.9
careers 1.0
theater 1.0
CGSimpleSmarty 1.4.3
Comments 1.9.2
Captcha 0.4
SiteMapMadeSimple 1.2.1
Restore 1.6

Issue: So when I try to load my page www.investorsolutions.com it ends up taking a while to load (sometimes 17 sec!) What we've identified is that the News module is populating 2 lists on the home page and we're limiting each area where they appear down to listing only 3 articles. I have over 700+ articles and when I run the site in debug mode I see the SQL query run two times and in both times it's indexing all 700 articles. I looked at the documentation in regards to the parameters that you can add and what I'm trying to do is limit the SQL statement to look through articles only from the past year or from "2012" for example.

Would you advise using the optional "start" parameter (e.g. start="0" - Start at the nth item -- leaving empty will start at the first item.) and specify an item like say 650 (remember I have around 700 articles).

A few points:

a: You're running an old and unsupported version of CMSMS (and therefore the news module). I don't think your problem is solved in 1.10.x though. In 1.11 the News module should be much faster.

b: The News module has the capability for pagination (which you don't have to use if you don't want to). by default, when {news} is called it will query the database for ALL published, non expired articles. You can limit the results using the {news number=3} style that will return at most 3 entries... the template may (but you can remove them) have links for going to the next/previous page etc.

c: for performance reasons you always must be concerned about minimizing the amount of data you are dealing with at any one time.
This does not mean you can't have 50000 records in the database. but it means that you have to be smart about how you query the database for the data you need. i.e: if the database is returning 700 records, and you're only displaying 3, there's probably something wrong with the way you're using the database.

d: Depending on how you're calling News it may be useful to do some mysql query analysis and add some more indexes.

I can't really say much more without seeing:
a: how you are calling the news module
b: your summary template
c: The number of fields etc.

_________________
Follow me on twitter
--
if you can't bother explaining your problem well, you shouldn't expect much in the way of assistance.
----------------
Don't make me angry..... you won't like me when I'm angry....