Contao slow on renowned provider

Hi all,

I have two websites (http://www.grondbezit.nl and http://www.gastvrijelandgoederen.nl) running on Contao hosted at XS4ALL (http://www.xs4all.nl) in Amsterdam. XS4ALL is the first and still leading, most secure, one of the biggest and most expensive :-( provider in The Netherlands. So they're no amateurs, just to make that clear.

On the whole Contao works rather slow at XS4ALL. Page loads in backend and frontend of about 3 to 5 seconds are normal. At some moments the system almost comes to a halt (30 to 120 secs). After endless calls with customer support, I got a link to a page maintained by one of the system managers at XS4ALL . I also had personal contact with him. He tells me, the problem lies in the internal architecture of Contao (the number of requests Contao sends to the database). Because of the extreme 'high availability settings' at XS4ALL, these speed problems of Contao are not 'masked' like with other providers. That is what he told me. Hmmm, obviously high availability for some, means low availability for others.

This is the page by system manager Daniël: https://daniel.mostertman.org/codex/Cms. Sorry, it's in Dutch only, but I guess you will understand it. He made an overview of the most commonly used CMSs and how they run on XS4ALL's servers. In the summary table at the beginning of the document it is stated that Contao is "Extremely inefficient / slow, but very beautiful and user friendly". At the end of the document you can find more details on the problem.

What is your opinion on this? Do you think this is a solvable problem? If not, I'll have to change providers, which is a hassle of course...

Thanks in advance,

Just

First of all, I'd like to say that I'm not doubting the level of professionalism of XS4ALL, I would recommend them as an internet provider even though they are expensive. I have no experience with the web hosting though, but my first reaction would be that if Contao runs slow on their servers then the servers might not be that fast, full or otherwise engaged in other activities.

I am running Contao on many different servers, ranging from professional dedicated servers to servers of companies that seem to have no idea what a server is, LAMP, WAMP and WIMP. I have not encountered a slow installation yet.

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Originally Posted by justs

Because of the extreme 'high availability settings' at XS4ALL, these speed problems of Contao are not 'masked' like with other providers. That is what he told me. Hmmm, obviously high availability for some, means low availability for others.

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Sounds like you're saying that because they have settings that ensure high availability, and are therefor slower; other servers mask their speed problems and are therefor faster? If I got this right then I'd like a more detailed explanation. This sounds ridiculous.

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Originally Posted by justs

This is the page by system manager Daniël: https://daniel.mostertman.org/codex/Cms. Sorry, it's in Dutch only, but I guess you will understand it. He made an overview of the most commonly used CMSs and how they run on XS4ALL's servers.

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I read the part about Contao, and an interesting thing here is that he says two database connections are opened, but only one is used. Perhaps a ticket should be created and see what Leo says about that.

Also three queries on a table are not indexed. Three queries read the entire tl_page table. But the interesting thing is that he claims he has a customer with a 600Mb large tl_page table. I looked up several mid-sized websites and the table is about 0,5Kb per page. 307200 pages? I think this guy is mistaken! And if he is not then these customers perhaps are using an inefficient non-standard extension that adds large amounts of data to a page.


How others view Contao's performance
I looked up some posts Vincent made because he is one of the people with experience with large installs, though dedicated and not shared...

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As far as hardware is concerned, TL is installed on a dedicated web & db server with minimal increase in load above idle service (quad core, ample RAM, RAID array, running RHEL+Apache). Responsiveness is excellent and page load latency is nil.

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source: viewtopic.php?f=4&t=992#p3860

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Hosted on a dedicated server, one of my TL instances is handling ~150K visits and ~400K page hits per month with neither compression nor page caching enabled.

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source: viewtopic.php?f=4&t=793&p=2851#p2851


Also Winans creative seems to have investigated

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We looked at Magento as an eCommerce solution and were horrified at the loads that were being placed on our systems from this and other similar "bloatware" out there, but TYPOlight's footprint has always been relatively small, which we like.

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source: viewtopic.php?f=4&t=992&p=3909&hilit=+footprint#p3 909

Hi Ruud,

Thanks a lot for your response. I'll try and contact the guy at XS4ALL and ask him more about the specific problems that he sees happening at their severs. I'll report back to the forum.

Just

Hey justs, did you ever hear back from them? I am curious as to how your enquiry played out in the end...