Each day, more and more clients are calling us to address the slow article saving problem that they are experiencing on their Joomla websites. We’re not 100% sure why this is becoming an increasingly common Joomla problem, but we think that it might be that more large sites are using Joomla (though we have no actual statistics to substantiate our claims – we just feel it!). It might also be that we are getting more clients because of our high quality work, we don’t know for sure… But what we do know is that the emergence problem is not caused by a sudden change in the Joomla core (although, in most cases, it is caused by the Joomla core).
Over the past few months, we have worked on a countless number of websites having this problem, and so we have developed a list of all the issues that may result in long article saving time (or, in many cases, timeouts). Here they are:
1. A big assets table: The assets table is one of the most critical tables on a Joomla website – if not the most critical. A small inaccuracy in that table may crash your website. Additionally, the more data you have in that table, the slower the article saving process becomes (mainly because of the lft and the rgt fields – which we are not going to discuss in this post). A good idea is to trim that table on a daily basis in a cron job – just make sure that you don’t have any special permissions on your articles before doing that. Follow our guide here in order to cleanup the assets table on your Joomla website.
2. A lot of tags: We never liked tags – and we have to be honest why we don’t like them: it is because we think they are mostly used for webspam. Now, we have yet another reason to hate them, and it is because article saving takes a long time on Joomla websites that have many tags. If you have more than a few hundred tags on your website, then you will have a noticeable delay when you save Joomla articles. Luckily for you, the solution to this problem consists of simple core changes rather than deleting your tags.
3. Smart Search: Whoever called Joomla’s Smart Search “smart” must really have lax standards when it comes to smartness – since Smart Search is anything but smart. In fact, Smart Search is so bad that there were actual plans to remove it from the Joomla core (unfortunately, these plans didn’t materialize). In a nutshell, the problem with Smart Search is the following: it works well when it’s not needed, and it doesn’t work well when it’s needed. You see, Smart Search was developed to cater for the heavy search requirements on large Joomla websites since the normal search plugin is inadequate for large websites, however, the problem is that Smart Search doesn’t take into consideration one of the most important factors on large Joomla websites, and it is there are many articles created/updated every day. The thing is, whenever an article is saved, the Smart Search plugin runs, and splits the article into many fragments that are saved in many tables. The fragment-saving process becomes increasingly heavy with time ultimately slowing down the whole website to a crawl. The solution to this problem is simple, and it is using Sphinx instead (and, of course, disabling the Smart Search plugins).
4. The ordering algorithm of Joomla articles: Let us explain how the ordering of Joomla articles works in layman terms. Let’s say you have 9 bricks on top of each other, and you want to add, and label, an additional brick. If you want to follow the Joomla ordering algorithm for doing things, you will do the following:
- You will ask 9 persons to help you in your endeavor.
-
You will ask each one of these persons to lift one brick, while ensuring that all the bricks are still on top of each other.
-
Ultimately, you will have some empty space at the bottom of the bricks, and so you add your brick there.
-
You label the bricks from 1 to 10, starting with the brick at the very bottom (the one that you just added).
Of course, a crazy idea would be to just add the tenth brick on top of the other 9 bricks instead of the bottom, and labeling the 10th brick “Number 10”, but where’s the fun in that? Additionally, you won’t get to meet these 9 nice people if you do it the old, unexciting way. Joomla’s ordering works in the same way, when a new article is inserted, all the articles in the same category are shifted (though not by real people) by 1. Obviously, this reordering process is very expensive on large Joomla websites. The solution to this problem is a core modification, which is explained, in details, in the article that we have just linked to.
5. A bad system/content plugin: So far, all the issues that we have discussed in this post are core issues, but the problem is not always caused by the core. Some system/content plugins, for example, try to grab data from another website using curl, a process that may take a very long time to execute and may cause the article saving process to hang. Last week, we worked on a Joomla website that had one of these bad plugins; we disabled all the system/content plugins one by one until we found it. When we opened the plugin, we noticed that it was setting the PHP maximum execution time to a very high number and was hiding all the errors. As seasoned PHP (and, of course, Joomla) developers, we know that both of these practices are very bad practices, but we also know that bad Joomla developers are everywhere.
Of course, there are other reasons that may cause the article saving process to take a very long time, two that we can think of are a hacked website and a ModSecurity rule. But they are not very common.
So, how to know which one from the above list is causing your problem? Well, you add an article to your Joomla website, and you monitor the performance of your Joomla website (or the load on your server, if you have access to that information), and if you see a degrading performance across the board (or a spike in the load), then your problem is likely caused by one (or more) of the first 4 reasons (in this case, you follow a process of elimination to know which one of the 4 is your problem). If you don’t, then your problem is likely caused by a bad plugin. Of course, if you need help speeding up the article saving process on your Joomla website, then you can always contact us. We are always there for you, our work is super clean, and our fees are super affordable.