CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I am evaluating civicrm/Joomla for a small non-profit that needs contact management, yearly registration functions with online fee payment, registration for conferences with online fee payment, e-mail lists etc. We currently pay ~$6-7,000/year for these functions from a commercial entity from which the administrative functions work pretty well but the web site leaves a lot to be desired. We have one paid employee who will need to administer civicrm, with help from me.

After giving up on several free hosts as test environments I installed civicrm 3.2.0 within Joomla! 1.5.20 using MAMP on my desktop Macintosh. Everything seems to work fine and I am convinced that civicrm is more or less a perfect alternative to our current commercial solution; civicrm actually is incredible and will do everything we need and much more. However, each admin page requires on average 30 seconds to load and front end pages require about 15 seconds. This is the only real stumbling block but it is entirely unworkable in the real world. I need some assurance that page loads can be reduced to something like 5 seconds. This is still pretty slow but at least some work could get done.

The civiCRM/Drupal and civiCRM/Joomla demo sites are plenty fast enough (http://drupal.demo.civicrm.org/). I would be very happy with this performance.

I have significant experience with Joomla although I am by no means a "professional". I have enough experience to know that my current civicrm behavior is way out of line with many, many other Joomla components even installed on slow shared servers. I understand that civicrm is resource-intensive and that page load times will be installation dependent. However, I would like to know that civicrm *can* be much faster before attempting to speed it up.

I have read many posts about slow civicrm. I'm not the only one with this issue. The suggestions range all over the map. I tried some. Google Page Speed shows ~1.4 MB of js loading on every page, even with repeat loads in the same session. Based on forum suggestions I increased memory to 256 MB (actually much more than suggested) in php.ini and added the following to httpd.conf:

# enable expirations
ExpiresActive On
# expire GIF images after a month in the client's cache
ExpiresByType image/gif A2592000
ExpiresByType image/jpeg A2592000
# JS documents are good for a week from the
# time they were changed
ExpiresByType application/x-javascript M604800

These changes made no difference.

Can someone point me to effective tools to troubleshoot this installation? I don't know much about this sort of troubleshooting and I am willing to learn and work on it. But my current civicrm installation is not consistent with any reasonable work schedule.

Thanks for any suggestions.