Speeding up the Culinate home page

From On Culinate by James Berry

February 20, 2009

In new code deployed to the site this morning I made some configuration tweeks that seem to have sped up the home page load times quite a bit. The home page is heavy with generated content, and the fritter section, in particular, costs a lot to produce and changes frequently.

I increased the size and time to live of our cache of content object cache, and added an additional fragment cache for the generated twitter content, which means that on most page hits we don’t regenerate the fritter content — the big win here.

I’ve got some other ideas that should also help performance, and which I hope to implement soon.