Tuning Your Engine
This year I somehow tricked Robert Eerhart, one of the guys behind Whooz! into letting me be a speaker at EECI2010 EU, in Leiden. And I'm bloody glad I did.
Quite simply, it was amazing. The banter, community, code and (most importantly) beer, all flowed freely. I made some amazing new friends in the eecms community and a handful of new ways to jump to the front of support queues (think incriminating photos and videos).
If you're interested you can get my talk in pdf form here : Tuning Your Engine (2.4mb), but I'd recommend you try and find the video of the presentation, if only to see my dapper waistcoat. (when it's available online, I'll post a link here).
For those not really interested in leafing through the full deck of slides, I'll sum it up briefly:
Photo by E M Von Nuil
Key Points
A wise old bearded man once told me that you should end with the key points. These were mine:
- Don’t rely on caches for performance
- Measure as you go
- Test with end-scale datasets
- Understand what’s going on
The Graphs
I need to be honest here. The whole talk was pretty much a ruse so I could justify making some graphs. And that's exactly what I did do. Graphs-a-plenty. In fact to aid just that I wrote an addon I've called Graphite. It hooks into the core of ExpressionEngine's template logging system and turns the processing times into a very readable graph, and you end up with something like this.
One the many, many graphs in my talk. This one shows a template with 2 entries loops and embed
EE2's Performance
Performance is a big topic, and I simply didn't have time to cover everything I'd have liked to in just 45 minutes. My presentation only touched on implementation changes we can make, and even then, only on the cost of loops, and how to measure them.
The 4 main areas where your implementation can affect build performance are : the site baseline, our data structure, the third party addons installed, and the way we build our templates. Each of those areas deserves it's own thorough exploration, but for now, I'll have to just leave you with the notes from my talk. Tuning Your Engine, by Joel Bradbury.
