Features / Usability

What is a typical page-display time at your site? When I last compared Tikiwiki load times with those of Joomla, Drupal, etc., there wasn't much difference, and the page content seemed to be the determining factor, not the site software.

If you have many features enabled, particularly ones that make database queries for view permissions or site activity (last posts etc.), or if you have heavy content such images, naturally these take time to be displayed, compared to a simple HTML page.

-- Gary

I'm having the same problem and mine has been up for years. It has not always been this way and I like Tiki so I'll monitor the responses here.

Pages take up to 10 seconds regardless of whether they are protected or available to anonymous users.

Using V 2.2

Home page comes up pretty quick but every other page takes around 35 seconds. Occasionally faster but almost always that long. Before it slowed down I'd get 3-5 sec for just about any page.

I got rid of some modules I really didn't need -no change.

I use the Eatlon theme which I made a copy of and edited the CSS in the copy but the slowdown did not happen concurrently with those changes. I've changed to other newer themes (faulkner, brtiki) and this has no effect.

Cleared the caches, no change.

I host another website on the same server and in my collection of directories (at Blue Host) and that works speedily (it's simple PHP and MySQL, not Tiki).

To get some data to compare, for reference, you can use a tool like http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt. Checking the home page here at tikiwiki.org with Pingdom shows a total loading time of 8.1 seconds. Of course these figures would vary depending on where you are geographically, what kind of internet connection you have, what browser you're using, etc. Some other Pingdom total loading times for Tiki-powered sites:

http://zukakakina.com (Tiki 3.1, fairly simple page) - 8.2 seconds
http://zukakakina.com/Tiki2/ (Tiki 2.4 fresh install) - 6.7 seconds
http://zukakakina.com/tw3/ (Tiki 3 dev branch) - 8.6 seconds
http://zukakakina.com/tw4/ (Tiki 4 (trunk dev files) - 8.1 seconds

This tool is very useful because it shows loading of individual files and indicates missing files (I found some missing background images in theme files, for instance ;-) ).

Comparing other software times:
http://drupal.org/node?page=1 (Roughly similar to tw.o top page) - 6.1 seconds.
http://demo.joomla.org/1.5/ (Roughly similar to the /Tiki2, /tw3, and /tw4 pages) - 5.8 seconds.
www.xoops.org/ (Similar to tw.o top page) - 9.1 seconds

So according to this tool, Tiki is in the ballpark, probably taking a hit for permission checks that I'm not sure are so pervasive with the other software. Also, looking forward, I believe some speed-ups are in the pipeline for Tiki, like combining CSS files and JS files (separately) before serving.

-- Gary

Very helpful.

Oddly some pages load quickly on Pingdom but twice as slow or more in my browser. Maybe this can be chalked up to dioffs between connections, location, etc.

I'll play around. Nice to know about the missing images -I found some too!

Tikiwiki's page display time has a lot of room for improvement, for sure (and devs are aware and some things are in the works). Still, (from my home DSL connection in Japan) from one page here at tikiwiki.org I can get another in about four seconds, which is pretty good.

Marks, you're right that Mediawiki page refreshes are fast. When I open new pages at www.mediawiki.org, in many cases I don't even see the entire page refresh, only the new content areas which, I guess, since Ajax isn't involved, means some of the page is loaded from browser cache. I don't see this happening much with Tiki, except for pages that can use Ajax (in Tiki 3 anyway), such as tiki-listpages.php (going from one section of the alphabetic listing to another).

-- Gary

I too have noticed a marked decrease in loading speed since last upgrade, though this seems to be limited to pages with HTML code (esp. linked images). Even after opting out of the store in gallery option for external images, the differences between pages with/without html images is quite noticeable.

Figured it out!!!! (at least for my pages): What was slowing down the loading was a googlemaps "get directions" link I had included on my pages. Deleted it, and presto! Everything loads just as quickly as before! Hope this helps other users who are including similar code in their pages.