Performance (ySlow E (52) rating)

First, every Admin of a Dolphin website (well, any website really) should be running Firefox w/Firebug and ySlow. They will tell you what is slowing down your website. As you may have read on the web recently, Google and Yahoo are actually taking website performance into account when ranking your website. So needless to say we should do everything possible to appease them.

Dolphin is a Mess :) JScripts loading in the header, CSS loading in the middle and at the bottom (the exact opposite of what you want as Javascript stops pipelining downloads, that's why you page is blank for two seconds then POPS up)

Anyway, chances are that it is going to take a vps/dedicated server to really use Dolphin to it's full potential, if only because you will need mod_deflate to compress all the css and js data.

The Developers could help by laying out the UNI template better, but until then why don't we see if we can work around some of the issues and get the speed up. We really want to aim for a ySLow rating of B (80) and as mine sits it is currently a E (52).ySlow is based on code and webserver settings rather than bandwidth and CPU speed so it's quite useful in optimizing all your websites.

Discuss

My site loads in average of 2.5s as verified by google.  I achieved this by using defalt in htaccess and I'm also working at getting eaccelerator up and running to help bring that time down even more.  Checkout my post on deflate and performance of the basic dolphin home page.  http://www.boonex.com/unity/forums/?action=goto&my_threads=1#topic/Site-Slow-to-Load.htm

There is good info in there for everyone to read and a link to another good post on setting up the server.

But my link only works if you have the deflate mod installed, you can use gzip commands to achieve the same.

Run your site through Firebug/ySlow and you will see that we have quite a bit more to do than just compression but I did track down some gzip for js and css and will see if it works.

<IfModule mod_gzip.c>  
    mod_gzip_on         Yes  
    mod_gzip_dechunk    Yes  
    mod_gzip_item_include file          \.(html?|txt|css|js|php|pl)$  
    mod_gzip_item_include handler       ^cgi-script$  
    mod_gzip_item_include mime      ^text\.*  
    mod_gzip_item_include mime      ^application/x-javascript.*  
    mod_gzip_item_exclude mime      ^image\.*  
    mod_gzip_item_exclude rspheader ^Content-Encoding:.*gzip.*  
</IfModule>