Made some speed-ups in weblog views ( sidebar caching )
07-September-2005
permalink email thisOur colleagues in the NGRF gavea big hands-on workshop in Cyprus Friday August 26, and were concerned about performance. It can really exercise a server having a couple dozen logged-in users demanding frequent refereshes of dynamic content... as we learned to our embarassment in a workshop early in the spring :o)
Since the spring workshop we have made numerous techie performancee tweaks to the basic server technoology we run, but at the same time we had been amassing the features in KNotes.
KNotes began life as a very nippy application - in fact, performance was one of our number-one goals. But in the way of these things, as features grew so did render time. We were due a thorough review of the speed of rendering an the size of the markup deleivered. So we made that review in advance of the Cyprus workshop.
Extended text for this entry:
We found that we could improve performance considerably by tweaking the indices which we;'d neglected, but also identified a number of areas in the rendering of weblog views where some content that changes infrequently was being rendered on every pageload in expensive ZPT iterations and multiple SQL fetches.
There are other caching enhancements that can be made, but the obvious easy win wad to cache the content of most of the sidebars. We have done this now, and the performance improvement is pretty dramatic in big busy blogs with long archive histories and lots of categories, etc.
The downside of caching, of course, is invalidation :o) We are automatically triggering a recalculation of the sidebar contents whenever a discussion or blog item, knlink or knexfile is edited in the weblog. This, however, does not cover the case where the sidebar links are changed; at the moment you have to click a new link in the manage sidebar to refresh the sidebar cache. We'll see about other wayd to trigger an invalidation from sidebar-links changes. I have also considered other methods for managin the siebar links - for instance 3rd party blogroll services, or special delicious accounts. The main advantage of the surrent system (whereby a Plone folder contains all the sidebar links) is that you can easily mak a weblog link to special features and content just by creating subfolders or non-link content types within the sidebar links folder. In any case, the current system will do for a while.
We'll be making further performance improvements over the coming week or two. Watch this space!
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