So, recently I have been working the final bugs out of MyLoganCounty.com and spreading the word around town to get business owners to start taking advantage.

During this process I’ve had to call on friends all over the place to Beta test for me so I knew where the bugs were.  Nobody can find the flaws faster than someone with fresh eyes.

My good buddy Bofe commented on my just-barely-better-than-craptastic load time on the site, so I’ve been engaged with speeding up my sites.  I find that my experiences with Joomla center around mastering one aspect at a time, so this time it’s optimization to reduce load time.

Right now, I’m using the 23-odd domains that I have to experiment with different caching techniques in Joomla so that I have a good basis of comparison.  The Extensions section on Joomla.org led me to a tool called PageCache 2.0.10 from JoomlaPerformance.com and the immediate results were good.  I saw, according to their measurements, auxillary page load times decrease to almost 1/5 what they were.

The problem was the index pages.  On one domain, RDL-USA.com, I saw page load time soar from 9 seconds uncached (high) to 17-19 seconds cached (outrageous).  Still haven’t figured this out yet.

So, after reading the usual “I know more than you ever will” banter on the Joomla forums, I found that I might have another issue: just watching the page load I saw that ads.mylogancounty.com stayed in the status bar in the bottom left of Firefox for quite a while.  When I unpublished the modules containing those calls to OpenX, the page load time dropped DRAMATICALLY.

So, if you’re out there, please- I’d love to hear about your experiences with managing a Joomla site with Cache enabled and banner management.  Thanks!