Re: How to Speed up TikiWiki
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