| Make Sure Your Joomla Site Runs Fast - Part 2 |
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| Wednesday, 28 February 2007 | |
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A short and sweet post today, following up yesterday's discussion about making your Joomla site smaller and faster. Someone over at Digg recently pointed out that if Digg made one small change they could save thousands of dollars in hosting costs ever year.
That change is to send out webpages in a compressed format. When you get a Joomla component it is often contained in a zip file. This enables the file to be much smaller without damaging the content in any way. You can do the same thing with webpages. In Joomla you just need to click "Yes" in the following place:
Site => Global Configuration => Server => GZIP Page Compression => Yes
Theres also a great test to find out how much your site will benefit. According to WhatsMyIP.org, Alledia.com shrinks from 47k down to just 9k when GZip is enabled. Some major sites are compressed such as YouTube.com, MySpace.com, CNN.com and Bebo.com. Others have still not made the leap:
Comments (7)
  written by Hummerbie, February 28, 2007
I just finished a post on http://seo4joomla.wordpress.com/ on some things you can do to speed up your Joomla site.
I looked at the GZIP Page compression as well, but your hosting server has to have it running, and most don't because of the CPU loads. I your want to check if your hosting provider has this active, go to your back-end: Menu choice system > system info > Tab PHP Info and Look at the Apache part: Loaded Modules: If there is no MOD_GZIP, don't set the option to yes... Good serie   written by steve, February 28, 2007
Hi Guys
Thanks for the interesting insights. After reading Zorros' comments I went back to check the most popular websites in the world to see where they cam down on the debate. 16 of the top 20 do use GZip - I presume to save on horrendous hosting bills. I seem to remember reading somewhere that Digg.com (who don't use GZip) runs on just three servers. They must be really well managed. Hummerbie - thats a great tool at http://www.irfanview.com/ and thanks for the information about checking your host written by Hummerbie, February 28, 2007
Hmm.... lets see...
Msn -No Live.com -No Yahoo.co.jp - No (Interesting) Microsoft - No Do you think that maybe, just maybe the don't run Apache for their websites Wondering what Yahoo uses.. written by steve, February 28, 2007
Interesting that Yahoo and Yahoo seem to have different technical set-ups.
Goes to show how popular Windows servers are with big websites  Only Microsoft use them...  written by ronn, June 09, 2007
I agree it is much faster using the gzip compression. But my host is very fussy about the CPU load and i am on a shared host. The allocoated Cpu load is only 20% of total shared load.
Now to decrease the load I need to disable the compression. But now I am using excellent Joomla Cache component called JAccelerator to cache somoe components and modules it works brilliantly. higly recommended written by Girish Singh, December 08, 2007
Why are we forgetting that gzippings actually means a lesser download for the user too. Thats faster load time. Load time is one thing thats of the highest importance to any website. And its above all other factors. Just goes to show why 16 of the top 20 use gzip. because faster servers they can afford, bandwidth on the server is no longer an issue. However faster load time for those living in 3rd world countries, still running slow dial up connections now thats a big issue. SO i guess server load is only a small price to pay.
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Bandwidth, on the other hand, is nowhere near as expensive as it used to be ... at least for most of us fellow Joomla users in the lower gigabyte per month range.
Personally I don't use gzip compression. My server totals about 30 GB a month so there's no real need to reduce bandwidth, while performance can be an issue at times. Obviously, my mileage varies from Digg's.