Question

Ive been working on my personal page which is based on drupal.
Ive noticed that it takes forever to load 6-10 seconds often.

After looking into some performance tests, specifically from site-perf.com,
I noticed that the load time is 80% queue time.

It seems lightbox2 and my theme contribute about 2/3 of the queue time.

Any suggestions on speeding this up?

Answer 1

Remember to cache and gzip your files in the .htaccess file in your root directory. If there isn’t one, make one, and then add this snippet:

#GZIP ----------------------------
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/plain
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/css
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/javascript
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xhtml+xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/rss+xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/javascript
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-javascript
<ifModule mod_gzip.c>
  mod_gzip_on Yes
  mod_gzip_dechunk Yes
  mod_gzip_item_include file \.(html?|txt|css|js)$
  mod_gzip_item_include handler ^cgi-script$
  mod_gzip_item_include mime ^text/.*
  mod_gzip_item_include mime ^application/x-javascript.*
  mod_gzip_item_exclude mime ^image/.*
  mod_gzip_item_exclude rspheader ^Content-Encoding:.*gzip.*
</ifModule>
<ifmodule mod_php4.c>
php_value zlib.output_compression 16386
</ifmodule>

#CACHE ----------------------------
<ifModule mod_headers.c>
    # MONTH
    <FilesMatch "\.(flv|gif|jpg|jpeg|png|ico|swf)$">
        Header set Cache-Control "max-age=2592000"
    </FilesMatch>
    # WEEK
    <FilesMatch "\.(js|css|pdf|txt|mp4|m4v|ogv|webm|ogg)$">
        Header set Cache-Control "max-age=604800"
    </FilesMatch>
    # DAY
    <FilesMatch "\.(html|htm)$">
        Header set Cache-Control "max-age=43200"
    </FilesMatch>
    # NEVER CACHE
    <FilesMatch "\.(pl|php|cgi|spl)$">
        Header set Cache-Control "max-age=0"
    </FilesMatch>
</ifModule>

Once you’re caching and gzipping, try to combine any files that aren’t parallel loading. If you find a file that’s waiting for another to load before it starts to download, then if possible, combine the two into a single file.