Is there a way to speed up the CMS on UNIX server?

Question

Just finished my first Craft CMS project. There have been some first hiccups but so far I've been really impressed!

There's one thing that I can't wrap my head around. It's a quite a massive website. This client wanted to be able to create different stories per project (loving the matrix here!!!) which got pretty large.

They're full of images and stuff but still the website is loading very quick. The only thing that feels slow (on and off) is the CMS itself. When looking at the different entries sometimes the system hangs and that's pure when looking at the overview of all the entries. Switching to a different entry type overview (page to structure for example) also feels sluggish.

Any tips how to speed things up? The site itself is perfect, it's just the CMS itself.

The server is running PHP 7.0 but has 128M. Not sure if upgrading it will give a performance boost to the CMS?

Answer 1

First of, check your web server error log wether or not php is dying because of memory exhaustion.

Second, working with many Craft objects/models tend to be slow, you can speed this up by using { cache } blocks cleverly, but be wary that using them wrong can severely impact your performance in a negative way. Check this blog post for some insight into the topic: https://nystudio107.com/blog/the-craft-cache-tag-in-depth

Third, the biggest improvement you can implement is caching before the application server (php), some alternatives are fastcgi cache (if using nginx), varnish, saas solutions like fastly/keycdn and probably many other I don't know about.

Implementing caching can be a big job depending on the site and should be thoroughly tested.

Fourth, you can add some sort of APM or tracer to investigate what part(s) of your solution is using the most time.

You don't mention the timings of your site, could you elaborate a bit about how slow it is?

In my experience it is hard to get a craft2 site with a lot of content down under 500ms ttfb without heavy caching, but ymmw.

Answer 2

Can you clarify how much RAM the VPS itself has?

In any event, yes, 128M for PHP sounds low to me; I set it to 512M for my Craft installs. I'd also suggest ensuring that opcache is enabled as well.