Speeding things up
I’m really pretty pleased with the marketing progress and I notice know that we are finally ranking on some swingers searches on Google - at last! So I guess that I’m now quite convinced that the site is going to succeed from a marketing point of view so I’m going to focus a little bit on the technical side to make sure we can handle the traffic.
My personal background is in marketing so I will naturally do better at growing the site than at the software and indeed I’ve already brought the server to a halt through a mix of my marketing success and technical incompetance!
The most important page of the site is the homepage. On my laptop (in debug mode which slows things down a bit) it renders in 176 ms which breaks down as:
- 32 ms for the Cheetah template
- 141 ms for the SQL querieis
- 3 ms for CherryPy
What makes me laugh about this is that I had been thinking about upgrading from CherryPy 2 to CherryPy 3 because they’ve speeded it up!
I’ve looked at the SQL queries and I’m not sure there’s much I can do to speed them up significantly so I think what I need to do is to get them cached. Unfortunately I’m struggling to get Cheetah’s cache to work.
Right now I’ve got plenty of capacity on the server so this isn’t a pressing issue but I really don’t want to have to do another hardware upgrade when I can increase my capacity through clever coding. Once I’ve got it sorted I can then do a smug podcast!