Strange MenuManager performance issues

appleyard · Post by **appleyard** » Mon Jun 13, 2011 6:57 pm

I love MenuManager, and I use it a lot. I have an attorney site where the right-hand column has two panels ("Practice Areas" and "Attorneys") both of which are populated dynamically using MenuManager. I have enabled caching where it makes sense and think I'm using best practices in general for site performance.

For the most part the site runs very smoothly, with most pages being generated in under 0.6 seconds. However, some pages take significantly longer — as much as 6 seconds. I think I've traced the resource hog to a particular MenuManager template that I use for listing attorneys in the main content block, but I have no idea why it would be requiring so many more resources. Here's the menu template code:

Code: Select all

{foreach from=$nodelist item=node}<a href="{$node->url}" class="practiceattorneylink" style="background-image: url('/images/attorney-thumbs/{$node->alias}.jpg');">{$node->menutext}</a>{/foreach}

When I include that template as {menu template="Attorneys" childrenof="attorneys"} (with 38 child pages) it seems to take FOREVER to load and returns the following performance stats: 
If I take out the menu completely and reload the time drops significantly: 
And, oddly, if I remove just the style=background-image info it's somewhere in between: 
That seems strange to me, since it shouldn't take that much time just to generate the code, should it? Also keep in mind the images are already being loaded by the page (and every other page) in the right-hand panel.

Here's the page in question: http://bit.ly/mdWvK2

Background info: site is running latest version of CMSMS, on a dedicated server. Both the page in question and the MenuManager templates are set to 'cacheable'. I can provide other details if they will help.

Can anyone suggest a solution to make this page generate faster? Is there something I'm missing in how MenuManager works?

Thanks!