Optimizing the performance of your JReviews site

The performance of a site depends on many factors that range from hardware to the scripts running on the site.

If you have a large database and growing traffic consider moving to a VPS or dedicated server

Shared environments limit the resources allocated to your site and sometimes host hundreds of other sites on the same server.

Avoid installing dozens of modules and plugins on the site. Keep only those that are indispensable

Everything you install on your Joomla site consumes resources and degrades performance. That includes components, modules and plugins. The more scripts you have running on the page, the more resources that page will use.

Sites with large data sets must avoid using any modules or pages that display random results

This includes the random modes for JReviews modules as well. In the worst case scenario for RAND() ordering MySQL requires a full table scan which can be very slow with a large number of records.

Create additional indexes in Joomla tables

For JReviews in particular the following indexes will help speed up performance for some of the database queries.

ALTER TABLE `jos_content` ADD INDEX `listing_count` ( `sectionid` , `catid` , `state` , `access` , `publish_up` , `publish_down` );
 
ALTER TABLE `jos_content` ADD INDEX `published` ( `state` , `catid` );
 
ALTER TABLE `jos_categories` ADD INDEX ( `title` ( 35 ) );
 
ALTER TABLE `jos_sections` ADD INDEX ( `title` ( 35 ) );
 
ALTER TABLE `jos_content` ADD INDEX `created` ( `created` );