Hello all,

I'm hoping to gain some recommendations on the what would be the best configuration for my server. I've spent a great deal of time reading threads from this and other forums and am a little confused as to what the most optimal solution for me.

I currently host a Joomla site. The site is a location review site which permits users to add a hotel and write a review, rate, comment, upload photos etc.

At the moment the site does not get a huge amount of traffic - Around 1000 unique visits a day (but this is growing). However, the site has been sluggish. Delays with initially loading the front page, delays in loading other pages throughout the site and generally less than perfect speed.

I have spent a while optimizing the CMS/Design/Code itself and at one point hired an admin to configure some caching at server level for me but this only improved things marginally (he configured xCache primarily).

I recently moved from the VPS I was using to host this site (3.0Ghz / 2GB RAM) to a dedicated server (Q9550 quad core 2.83ghz / 8GB RAM).
What I am after are some recommendations from people who have experience in the optimisation field.

I currently have a brand new server with nothing but WHM/Cpanel loaded so am in the position to change Apache out for something else or indeed recompile Apache with whatever modules, the same with PHP.

I have looked at lightspeed, lighttpd, nginx and various Apache configurations and a host of php caches and I am lost as to what would really be the best solution/combination for me, someone who hosts a Joomla (dynamic) site with lots of user interaction and a rapid increase in usage.

If someone would be kind enough to offer some suggestions I'd be really grateful.

Thanks

However, the site has been sluggish.

Well you are running Joomla so that's about average.

I would suggest the following:

• Install cache component for Joomla
• Install nginx as reverse proxy
• Serve static files directly via nginx
• Try to optimize mysql if your database gets many requests
• Onsite use only components, plugins and modules you need. Disable all others
• Try not to load content from other sites as it may delay page loading

All of these pointers should help you out better optimizing your Joomla site for performance.