Optimization questions

(sorry for the long post)

I had performance and stability issues on my relatively low level (XEON 4 cores, 2 GB RAM, SAS disks) cPanel VPS (Centos 5.11 WHM 56) server, thus I moved to a much better VDS (i7-2600, 16 GB RAM, SSD, 100 Mbps interface). SW reached end of life anyways... Current configuration has CENTOS 6.8 x86_64 vmware – WHM 58.0 (build 31).

Currently I'm hosting about 10-13 Joomla 1.5i, 2.5, 3.x sites. Traffic is considerably low (mostly 250-300 individual visitors/month, top one is 20.000 visitors/month).

I used EA4 with cPanel Worker MPM and customized options for my needs. I did set security measures (cpHulk, PHP, ClamAV, CSF) but did not optimize anything yet (server is up for less than a day now). Joomla installations are already optimized (with default caching, expires headers, gzip, ...).

When testing vanilla server (freevps bench & SysBench 0.4.12) I get very good results, as expected.

On the other hand, when I test the web sites with PageSpeedGrader, the results did not change according to my expectations (done at night time, several times).

A web site with empty index.html doubled the speed (to 0.71 sec), but in the worst case the speed increase is only %15 (7.05 sec). Average of 12 websites speedup is ~50%.

Testing with bytetest.com, time to first byte is between 0.297 to 0.562 seconds.

When I look at the waterfall in the worst performing website (pagespeedgrader.com):

0.649 sec GET mydomain.com
2.020 sec GET www.mydomain.com/joomladir
...
Global result: 7.01 sec

If I repeat the results I get similar results.

As you can see I have an .htaccess with 301 redirection. Although any additional stuff is Jomla related, these first two items must be server & location related.

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The old server was running suExec & fcgi, but with EA4 we have limited options (no fcgi, caching, nginx etc support, what else?) for configuration (yet) as far as I can see...

I'll optimize Apache and MySQL but I think they wont make much a difference in my case (high server specs and low load conditions).

I'll greatly appreciate any recommendations for this. It might help other admins using Joomla as well. I could not find any directions in the last couple days.

Thank you in advance...

 

Thank you for answering

I did have a look php-fpm but EA4 documentation seemed very discouraging :

PHP Handlers - EasyApache 4 - cPanel Documentation

Thus I'm not sure if I can try it on my (now) production server.

Additionally I have no idea how to set it up?

 

Thank you for clarification... I'll wait for v60 for PHP-FPM then.

Other than that, any ideas how I can speed up initial server response as of v58?

As I removed HW issues it must be configuration related...

Thank You...

 

I want to update for others seeking similar information.

I didn't touch Joomla installations in any way, as they were already optimized in the old server. But after a lot of research I decided to use mod_pagespeed and after a lot of tuning and testing the total speedup from the old server is a bit more than 2x on the average...

I used lossless JPG compression connected to a cron, but it has minimal effect as the images we prepared were mostly optimal.

mod_pagespeed's two settings were very successful on performance:

1) Re-compressing images taking the user viewport into account and caching them. Of course it is degrading the JPG quality but it was minimal...

2) Lasy loading images. We was using similar in some installations but enabling it serverwide was good to get the first view on the screen ASAP.

I have some plugins in Joomla installations which are doing similar optimizations, I'll remove them to not to process stuff twice...