Speeding up CMSMS

[Ziggywigged]

calguy, when will you make this available?

[calguy1000]

oh man, I should have bet money on this, I should have bet money

anyways

we're currently debugging issues related to some stupid browsers developed by international conglomerates that make a billion or more a day in revenues not supporting standards properly.

When this is done, I'll commit everything into svn.

Then I'll get started on some other, more complex issues like being able to specify variables for use in the tltie tag from the html body, etc, etc.

and if all of that goes well, and we can organize well enough, there may be (just maybe) be a 1.4 release.

And if this happens, and if some people can actually learn to contribute instead of being anti-social, we'd encourage some actual diffs against current svn to maybe take care of a few other inefficiencies, or implement a few other things that 'we just haven't noticed or taken care of because we're too busy fixing bugs or implementing features or having real lives'.... 

[faglork]

I had an idea last night about speeding up stylesheets.

The problem exists that stylesheets were not getting cached in the browser... and this was due to a lack of understanding of how the cache stuff worked wrt http headers.

So I did some research and think I finally understand it, and I began working on a solution.

a) I modified the {stylesheet} tag to output seperate links to each stylesheet by cssid and to do database lookups
    to convert stylesheet name to id where necessary.
b) I modified the stylesheet.php to tread a cache file (tmp/cache/csshash.dat) which contains an md5sum of the
    css in the stylesheet and a stylesheet id as a key.
    - if the key does not exist for a particular stylesheet id, then the stylesheet is read, output, and the
      md5sum cache updated.  I then output the new md5sum and a last-modified date.
    - if the key does exist, and the hash matches that supplied by the browser, then an "HTTP/1.1 304 Not Modified"
      result is returned.

Preliminary results indicate a dramatic performance improvement because stylesheets can now be cached on the browser.
[..]

A lot of effort just to stick to dynamic stylesheets ... I will still prefer a "real" static CSS. The reason?
With a "real" CSS you can work *much* faster: You simply install the Web Developer Extension for Firefox, and you can work on your CSS in *realtime* - your screen updates as you type along - then you just save your modified CSS and upload via FTP and you're done.

Just my 2 cents,
Alex

[calguy1000]

A lot of effort just to stick to dynamic stylesheets ... I will still prefer a "real" static CSS. The reason?
With a "real" CSS you can work *much* faster: You simply install the Web Developer Extension for Firefox, and you can work on your CSS in *realtime* - your screen updates as you type along - then you just save your modified CSS and upload via FTP and you're done.

a) I want dynamic stylesheets, because later I'm thinking of applying smarty to the stylesheets, so dynamic functionality is definitely needed for that.
b) have you checked out the 'Template Externalizer' module.  it allows you to play with your page templates and stylesheets via ftp.

[Pierre M.]

So, If I understand correctly, in-browsers-caching of CSS is improving, hence CMSms speed is improved, while CMSms CSS management is kept compatible with Template Externalizer and on the road to be better with Smarty integration. Yeah ! Thank you Calguy1000.

@Alex : I'm sure the webserver under CMSms can render such URLs almost static by tuning headers/cache/expire :
href="http://xyz.fr/folders/cmsms-1.3/stylesh ... ype=screen"
According to the content-type (CSS) the webserver can put >15 minutes expiry time for http 304.

Pierre M.

[rugby]

There is one simple thing you can do to speed up CMS Made Simple - insert this:

Code: Select all

session_cache_limiter('none');

at the top of your index.php.

It will tell PHP not to send no-cache header, thus allowing to cache the page by your browser.

[Pierre M.]

It may prevent the sending of "no-cache", but does it work well with CMSms Expires and eTags ?
(I'm not a PHP programmer)

Pierre M.

[Glaukas]

thanks a lot guys!

[Gregor]

I use Yslow, a Firefox plugin to see my side performance. Besides that it gives you an idea of the performance, it also gives suggestion for improvement.

Gregor