Themebot Traffic Report
It is exciting and also dismaying when that email arrives from the hosting provider with a warning that your website has been disabled due to "Severe Resource Abuse." On one hand, it signifies that you have built a popular website with a lot of people coming to visit, which is what every webmaster wants. On the other hand, it means that it may be time to upgrade to a more expensive hosting option. Not only does this require spending more money, it also entails transferring the site to the new server, dealing with configuration headaches, downtime for visitors and then a lot of testing to make sure everything is working properly again.
Themebot doesn't have deep pockets and is very very busy these days, so upgrading to a dedicated server was not an option. I started looking around for ways to increase the performance while lowering the server load. The main site runs on Joomla. After the first time the site was disabled, I turned on Joomla's core caching mechanism. This seemed to help a little, but not much. There is also an installation of Gallery2 and SMF forum, and these didn't seem to be affected by the Joomla cache.
My search for optimization strategies led me to IRCMaxell's component Page Cache.
This component caches all of the pages in Joomla for guest visitors, including the bridged Gallery2 pages. The first time a page is visited, it is loaded into the cache. You can configure how often the cache is cleared, creating a balance between performance and dynamic content.
I am extremely impressed with the performance gains I am seeing after installing Page Cache. The load time for pages has improved drastically. Some pages were taking 8 to 12 seconds to load before this component was installed. Those same pages now load in less than 1 second. This is going to greatly reduce the load on the server, and will also provide a much better browsing experience for visitors. If you have a busy Joomla site, you should check this component out. The programmer has done a great job.
Please send a heads up if you notice any problems with the site. I'm going to be doing further testing to make sure everything is working properly. Once it all checks out, I'll be sending a donation to IRCMaxell. Long live open source!