Why Caching Your Joomla Site is So Useful

Written by Steve Burge

For about a week this month there were problems with the cache component we use here on Alledia.com. I turned it off while we tried to bugshoot the issue.

We also use Pingdom.com to track whether our sites are offline and also how fast they're responding. When I logged in today, I found a stellar argument for why caching your Joomla site is so important:

Alledia.com loads twice as quickly with the cache turned on.

Alledia.com Response Times for September

If you don't already have one, there are two cache components available for Joomla:

Joomlatwork's Cache Accelerate Component (commercial, 1.0 and 1.5)
IRC Maxell's Page Cache (free, 1.0 only)

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Your Comments (10)

Sean Daily

September 30, 2008

Steve, as always, your timing is uncanny and impeccable with these articles. We have recently been shutdown several times due to massive traffic spikes, and have been researching the Joomla page caching components you mentioned as a potential solution.

Before jumping in I'm really curious to hear others' results. Is Joomlatwork's component worth the $$, or does IRC Maxell's Page Cache do essentially the same job (we're on 1.0.x)?

Sean

Steve Burge

September 30, 2008

Hi San

I'd certainly give IRC Maxell's Page Cache's a spin first. Be aware that neither work for logged in users, only guests.

Klaus Nitsche

October 01, 2008

I tried IRC Maxell's Page Cache on my blog for a while. The performance improvement was tremendous.

It didn't play nice with JomComment though (didn't recognize when a new comment was posted, so it still served the cached pages and commenters wouldn't see their comments) and no solution could be found, so I had to ditch it.

Too bad since speed gains were really significant.

Kind regards,
Zorro

kingbt2

October 03, 2008

What about J1.5 default cache? Is it usefull? At how many visitors should we turn on cache 10-1000 /day?

Sean Daily

October 06, 2008

Zorro, did you try the JomComment specific plugin that IRCMaxell provides to fix that?

Klaus Nitsche

October 06, 2008

@Sean: Yes I did, but it didn't help. Anthony said he had an idea where the problem was, but somehow it never got fixed.

Kind regards,
Zorro

Sean Daily

October 06, 2008

I'm trying to get IRC Maxell working with J!Reactions commenting engine but the IRCMaxell.com site seems to be completely down so not able to get any support info atm. Anyone gotten this component to work with any of the commenting engines, or have any tips in this area?

Steven Johnson

October 22, 2008

Thanks for this post. I was unaware of how beneficial a good Caching component could be. I have installed Joomla Accelerate on one of my sites and seeing great results. In addition Joomlatwork has been extremely helpful in getting some of my more interactive components to work correctly.

Thanks Again for bringing this to our attention!

Tom Thorns

November 19, 2008

What about the standard Joomla cache in J1.0? Is that any good? Does it play nice with Community Builder / Mosets Tree / FireBoard / JomComment?

I've never dived in with caching before but I'm in need of it now!

Paul S

June 17, 2009

What about the page cache plugin which comes standard with Joomla! 1.5 (but is disabled by default)? When you turn that on you get a HUGE speed improvement (especially noticable on pages that have many modules that access the database). Is this the sort of caching you're talking about here? I actually came across this article because I'm looking for a way to elect for certain articles not to get cached. Any hints? I know Joomla! doesn't provide for this by default, just wondering if I can adjust something in the core?