Optimising site performance

You can do severeal things to make your Saurus-based website run faster.

Turning on site cache

The first and easiest is using a site cache: go to the Admin section (www.yoursite.com/admin). Choose System -> Configuration and locate the "Performance" section.

From there you can turn on site cache. This saves each page request into the database and serves the page from there on the next page view. The pages in cache will be renewed after the cache expiration time is over. Also when you edit your site on any page the cache will be emptied.

Configuring Apache

You can configure your webserver to compress and cache content on client side by using gzip compression, expiration headers and ETaging files.

Gzip compression compresses the page content to conserve bandwidth and boost download speed.

Expires headers are used to cache page content on the client side in the browser. The content is only retrived if the expiration time is over or browsers cache is emptied.

Etags is used to cache files like stylesheets, javascript and images on the client side.

To put all those three together following lines should be added to your Apache's configuration file, replace "/path/to/website/root" with the actual path to the Saurus installation:

<Directory /path/to/website/root>
	
	# add compression for js, css, php and html file
	<IfModule mod_deflate.c>
		<FilesMatch "\.(js|css|php|html)$">
			SetOutputFilter DEFLATE
			# dont gzip for IE6
			BrowserMatch \bMSIE\s6 no-gzip
		</FilesMatch>
	</IfModule>

	# add expiration date for requests
	<IfModule mod_expires.c>
		ExpiresActive On
		ExpiresDefault "access plus 1 day"
	</IfModule>

	# ETag files for caching
	FileETag MTime Size

</Directory>

<Directory /path/to/website/root/public>

	# don't expire files in public folder
	<IfModule mod_expires.c>
		ExpiresActive Off
	</IfModule>

</Directory>

<Directory /path/to/website/root/extensions>

	# don't expire extension files
	<IfModule mod_expires.c>
		ExpiresActive Off
	</IfModule>

</Directory> 

Don't forget to restart Apache for the changes to take effect.

A great way to check if your changes are working is to use a Firefox add-on YSlow which is a performance testing tool for webpages.