All Joomla! performance changes and optimizations can be made through the administrator back-end of Joomla!, or by downloading and editing the configuration.php file. Don’t know how to download and edit the configuration.php file? Have a look at my Dutch article on how to edit files through FTP (Google Translate the article, or just look at the screenshots).

Let’s start tuning Joomla!

Joomla! MySQL database functions

Current versions of Joomla! can operate on MySQL, SQL Server and PostgreSQL database back-ends. For MySQL there are two interface choices: “MySQL” and “MySQLi“. Nowadays every Joomla! version supports the MySQLi database functions, so we want to use that.

The i in MySQLi stands for improved and is the recommended MySQL interface to use, and offers better performance.

We all know the old ext/mysql functions will be removed from PHP in the near future.

Update: ext/mysql is already removed since PHP 7.

The specified MySQL interface is defined in configuration.php:

public $dbtype = 'mysql';

Change this to mysqli:

public $dbtype = 'mysqli';

Joomla! Session handler

Optimize Joomla!’s session handler. By default, Joomla! stores all session information in its MySQL database. This can be ideal if both the MySQL database and Joomla! website are on the same physical server. When it’s not, this generates a lot of unnecessary traffic between the database and website, just to verify a session. For every visit. See the chart:

Joomla ACL decision flow-chart

This, of course, is a performance drain.

Therefore, it’s recommended to store Joomla session information on the web server’s file system. This provides faster access to its session files and information.

How and where sessions are stored is defined by the Session Handler: $session_handler. When the session handler is set to 'database', change it to 'none':

public $session_handler = 'database';

public $session_handler = 'none';

Remove unused Components, Plugins, Modules, and Templates

Over time a lot of components, plugins and modules are installed, tested, and disabled on your website. This probably, goes for templates as well. When a request to your website is made and the PHP process starts up, it indexes all files in your website. Even those files of disabled components, plugins, modules and templates, simply because they are on the file system.

Going through the file system and indexing those unnecessary files takes up a lot of additional time (relatively), it’s best to simply remove (delete by FTP) all unneeded files and directories.

Convert your Joomla! MyISAM database tables to InnoDB

When you run Joomla! on your website for a longer period of time now, chances are your database tables are still using the older and less performing MyISAM storage engine. It is wise to update and convert these tables to InnoDB. The reason is that InnoDB is actively developed and MyISAM is not, therefore InnoDB tables provide more performance than older MyISAM.

Joomla cache handler – Set up a Joomla! caching handler with WinCache, Cache_Lite or File

Use caching in Joomla!

If your web hosting provider has WinCache available on the web server, then this will give a great performance boost for your website. If WinCache is not available, at least use Cache_Lite as cache handler: in your configuration.php, set $caching to 1 (enabled, conservative), or 2 for progressive caching.

Joomla Cache Settings

Set Joomla!’s $cache_handler to File or cachelite:

public $caching = '1';
public $cache_handler = 'File';
 // public $cache_handler = 'cachelite';
 // or 'wincache' if available

Don’t forget to make sure your cache\ folder is writable.

WinCache for Joomla! 1.5?

WinCache as cache backend is not supported on Joomla! 1.5. You shouldn’t be using an ancient version like Joomla! 1.5 anymore! See Joomla!’s CMS versions for more information.

Anyway, if you’d like to add WinCache support for Joomla! 1.5, grab Don Raman’s wincache.php cache storage file from the blog post performance improvement in Joomla using WINCACHE user cache, and place the file in libraries\joomla\cache\storage. Now you can configure $cache_handler to utilize WinCache.

Joomla Gzip compression

Enable gzip in Joomla, you don’t want to have gzip disabled!

Gzip compression compresses the response body sent from the web server to the browser. A smaller file is downloaded faster, making visitors happy, and a happy visitor is a returning visitor. Gzip compression in Joomla! is also known as buffered output.

In your configuration.php file, locate

public $gzip = '0';

and set $gzip to 1, to enable gzip compression in Joomla!

public $gzip = '1';

Let me repeat: Enable Joomla! Gzip compression is one of the things you must do to make your website load faster. To Enable Gzip go to System > Global Configuration > Server – where you’ll find an option Gzip Page Compression. Simply click Yes and Save.

enable Gzip compression in Joomla!

To Disable Gzip go to System > Global Configuration > Server, set to No, and then Save.

Joomla! optimization extensions

There are many extensions that try to improve the performance of your Joomla! website. Like the earlier mentioned WinCache. Here are a few that I can recommend:

• JCH Optimize – Combines JavaScript & CSS, combines images into sprites, minifies and compresses JavaScript, JCH Optimize helpts to minimize expensive http requests.
• Jbetolo – All the functionality that JCH Optimize has plus CDN support, jbetolo primarily helps you with your front-end optimization,
• JotCache – Improves the built-in Joomla caching system, JotCache is advanced solution for page caching in Joomla!
• Cache Cleaner – With Cache Cleaner you can clean your cache fast and easily via a link in your Joomla! Administrator

Bonus Tips: run an as high as possible Joomla version

Every new Joomla! version comes with new optimized PHP code, functions and settings. Use them! Always run an as high as possible Joomla! version to make use of these improvements.

Optimze and lossless compress images, minify JavaScript & CSS
Make sure your images are optimized for the web properly. Optimize and lossless compress images and minify JavaScript and CSS files is very easy to do. It drastically downsizes your website size (footprint), and making it load faster.

And further, curious how I optimized my web hosting? Learn how to do the same

Let’s be honest, PHP is PHP, so whether you use Joomla! as your CMS or Drupal or WordPress, most performance is gained through your PHP hosting environment. And MySQL, do not forget about your MySQL database server! So read how I optimized my web hosting environment, and start doing the same.

Pro tip: Learn how to optimize PHP on your website or IIS web server? Or just to improve OPcache settings.

Conclusion

Out-of-the-box, Joomla! is not very optimized for performance. With just a few basic tweaks and settings, we’ve optimized Joomla! performance extensively. Page loads are much faster. All changes can be made through the administrator back-end, or by downloading and editing the configuration.php file.

Here is the relevant transcript for this video:

Hey there, Joomla fans. Tim Davis here. I'm a Joomla fan too. Thanks for tuning in to this week's Maintenance Monday Live Stream.

I missed last week. Things got super busy. But I'm doing one today so remember, subscribe to the channel and ring the bell to receive updates and notifications of new live streams and tutorials.

Today we're going to look at what to set the Session Handler to on our Joomla sites. So let's head on over to the screen and we will take a look at what we're talking about here.

I can't really zoom in like I do when I make a tutorial so we're just down here at the bottom of the screen in the Configuration File. Now to get there we go to System, Global Configuration, and then click on the System tab. You might see Site first, but click on System.

So basically, the Session is information that is set when you log in saying, "Hey Tim is logged in to the site, and so we will talk to Tim's computer." And in layman's terms there's a permission set and connections. Then once that Session is set you have in this case, 15 minutes to be doing something on the site: saving it or closing a window or calls to the server, and each time you do something the Session is reset.

If you leave - in this case the way this site is set - after 15 minutes and do nothing, then the Session expires, so that if someone came walking along to go on your computer they won’t be able to get on; unfortunately, that also includes you.

There are two options right now in Joomla. This is a Joomla 3.7.5 site and there are two options of where to store the Session information.

Probably by default when you set up your Joomla site it is set to Database. So, the information that records that your visit is active is stored right in your Joomla database, and that works great. But if your server or your web host is set up for it - and on Cybersalt Hosting it is set up for this - if you switch from Database to PHP then your Session information, instead of being sent to the database and a hard drive spinning, or maybe you have an SSD drive on your servers or your host has SSD drives - instead of going to a drive, the Session information is stored in a file right on the server. That's always faster. When you can write to a file that's running in the memory on the server instead of saving it to a hard drive then that is faster. And especially some people will run Joomla but the database is on an entirely different server. So, this can speed up things.

Now the reason I haven't saved this yet is because if your web host is not set up to handle Sessions through the PHP method or through a file method then if you save this you might get locked out of your Joomla site. So don't try this unless you're sure that you can switch up the PHP - maybe you have sites on the same server and you're working on different ones, or until you are sure that you can go into your control panel for your web hosting to go and edit this right in the file. Now, before I save this, we'll just look how to do that.

In this tab, here's the file manager for this web hosting account that I have this Joomla site on and basically what I've already done in the file manager in this Control Panel, is clicked on file manager and then in the root folder that Joomla is installed you want to find the configuration.PHP file. Then when you find that you want to edit it.

Now I'm not going to open this right now because I can't blur out password information on a Live Stream, but what I will show you is this. If you save your configuration file after switching to PHP for your Session Handler and your site doesn't work, go into the file space, go into configuration.PHP, find the line in your configuration.PHP that says "public session_handler" and what you will see is this: once you switch to PHP the handler equals "none." You would think they would say PHP but it says "none" because I think that's a carry-over from some other versions, because the option used to be between database or none. So, when you see public session _ handler = "none" if you want to switch back, switch that to "Database" and then save your file in your file manager and then your Joomla site will come back online. So let's just go back here because I want to show you what happens when you do change this.

One another thing. Remember back up your site. I've got a tutorial on how to do that which you can access here. Backup your site regularly because as you're tinkering around with this stuff something can happen at any time; you never know.

Alright, so now we're logged in to the backend of the site here still, Session Handler was at Database, we switched it to PHP, now I'm going to save it. When I save it, I'm going to get kicked out of the back end of the site and that's why we wanted to make sure that you have access to the file manager on your web hosting because if the screen had just gone black then I would have been in a bad way. But basically, when you switch the method to where your sessions are stored, you have to create a new session - you're logged out.

So I can log into here and that will take us back into the site and we can go System, Global Configuration, and just for maintaining or perhaps even it's more just setting up our site here we now have changed Session Handler from Database to PHP which is the "none" method, and there it is and it stuck.

So that's just something that you can do to give yourself a little bit of boost of performance in your Joomla site and a good way to set it up if your web hosting is set up for that.

So as always, enjoy your Joomla sites and God bless you.

Don't forget to subscribe.

Joomla is causing “Too many connections” database errors

1 down vote favorite

 

I'm getting "too many connections" errors from mysql, and I think that its caused by recurring ajax calls that are hitting a joomla backend page.

I'm wondering, does Joomla make a new mysql connection for each page load, or would it store the connection in the PHP session?

How can I find this out?

mysql joomla2.5

shareimprove this question

edited Jan 30 '13 at 21:01

 

 

asked Jan 24 '13 at 16:30

ContextSwitch

1,76952745

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1 Answer

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up vote 3 down vote accepted

The problem was that joomla was writing the session to a mysql db. Disabling that option resolved the "too many connections" error.

Just to clarify the steps I took in the Joomla admin:

Site > Global Configuration > System > Session Settings

Set Session Settings to None (or something other than database)

shareimprove this answer

edited Feb 1 '13 at 21:14

 

 

answered Jan 30 '13 at 21:00

ContextSwitch

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•  
  I have been having the same issue for some time now, however I have set the session setting to none since the begining of the month and I'm stilling seeing session info inserted into the jos_session table. Have you checked this table to see if you have info updated as people load your site? I would really appreciate your reply. Thanks! – user2051700 Feb 7 '13 at 17:04
• 1
  @anaestrada What was happening for us was when we had more than about 80 people on our site, all the session writing to the mysql db would tie up all the mysql connections, and disabling it resolved that issue. After checking the database, it looks like Joomla is still using the session table though to keep track of users visiting the site, the difference is its not storing the $_SESSION array in there, which made a huge difference for us. – ContextSwitch Feb 7 '13 at 18:53