List Performance Concerns

[SteveRL]

We are experiencing what I think is slow list performance but I have nothing to compare it to so I'm wondering if this is normal behavior or something outside of that. We have a list that displays ~30 elements (no joins) and gives the following averages when loaded:

About 20 records, average time: 3.59s
About 200 records, average time: 13.55s

I've gone through checking the templates, updating Joomla, and various other things but nothing seems to have a significant impact. Testing switching from PHP 5.4 to PHP 7.1 did have a slight positive impact, maybe a 15-20% increase. It is shared hosting but from what I've read on the forums, that shouldn't be a factor.

Attached is a screenshot of a 200 record query.

 

[cheesegrits]

When you say "200 records" do you mean you are trying to display 200 records in one go, ie. you "display" number is set to that?

If so then yes, I would expect long render times. Rendering list data is a very computationally intense process.

You can reduce the time by displaying as few elements in the list as possible, and for ones you don't display, set "include in list query" to No, and "Always render" to No.

-- hugh

 

[SteveRL]

Thanks Hugh,
Yes I have the "display" defaulted to 100. So it sounds like that's the issue. I will see if it's possible to reduce that number and/or look at removing elements from the render.

 

[cheesegrits]

Yup. Even for simple lists I rarely go beyond displaying 50. For complex ones / ones with lots of elements, I usually stick to 20 or less.

It's really down to the number of elements being rendered for display, as that's the time consuming part. So if you are displaying 100 rows of 30 elements, that's 3000 elements to individually render. And it's the nature of the beast that Fabrik has to build everything from first principles, essentially building your entire app on the fly on every page loadm based on generic metadata in the database.

It's hard to find an analogy, but imagine working in your kitchen, cooking a meal, where you have to assemble every appliance from kit form every time you want to use it, and make every ingredient from scratch. if the recipe calls for mayo, first catch your chickens, get the eggs, age some wine into vinegar, grow your mustard seeds, mine your rock salt, assemble your electric blender from kit form ...

-- hugh