Performance thoughts

[dave_finlayson]

mmm, may be worth looking into. I'll have a fiddle! Although if Actinic could just do it faster it would be much easier. Would also appreciate their thoughts on twhy it makes the snapshot so much longer!

[gabrielcrowe]

ninjas?

[completerookie]

I have installed a free utility called FLZIP - replacing the built in version of compressed folders coming with XP
when I do small zip files, there's no time difference, but when I compress large files/directories such as actinic, the speed of FLZIP is much much better than XP
so I suspect that because the*acd file is just a zip file renamed, it may pay them to make a dedicated zip programme as part of actinic rather than relying on MS Bloatware

[completerookie]

where's the "Server Side Include" switch to allow you to include it?

whats the syntax for SSI within the pages where you want your navigation to appear?

ta

[Jan]

Also, I can't for the life of me work out why this would slow down the snapshot!

Actinic has to render all of the pages to collate the list of files to include in the snapshot.

Dave do you have a URL for your site?

Regards,

[dave_finlayson]

Jan,

I guess that makes sense. I think I will fire a snapshot over to Actinic and get them to look at the code, it seems very weird that just that one code section slows things down so much, even if it is carrying out a lot of processing.

The site is www.sportswarehouse.co.uk

[Jan]

Sending a snapshot is a good idea, one thing I noticed from looking at your (very nice looking) store is that you have best sellers on your front page along with another list of sale items (I wasn't sure how these were generated so might not be relevant).

There was a thread a while ago that talked about slow upload for large stores with best sellers on their front pages, the slow speed was caused because it took a while to generate the best sellers information for every page in the store and a workaround was written that basically took the best sellers info off the page onto another page that was then just included, so rather than being generated for every page it was only generated once and then included.

I am fairly sure that this is in the AUG for V8, it might be worth implementing this.

Regards,

[dave_finlayson]

Jan,

I did look at this but I like being able to upload a fresh copy of every page every day and the best sellers list is a great way to do this. Also, in my 'fiddling about' to see if I could speed things up I removed the best sellers, special offers (actually the new products list) and also boughts. It didn't make any big difference to the page generation time.

Will pop a snapshot across to Actinic and report back, if they find anything of any interest!

[dave_finlayson]

Have heard back from Actinic and it seems the issue was with the variable <actinic:block type="EntireSectionList" >, which loops through every section every time a page is generated, not good for a site using Product Per Section. PLEASE NOTE: This is not a bug, it's how the variable is supposed to work.

So, I have now handcoded the navigation and for all the main navigation (departments) changes it makes a lot of sense. Conditional blocks control highlighting of current sections and works just as well as the all singing all dancing previous code, except you need to add new sections manually.

Page generation is now about 4 mins for about 1600 products and sections, about the same as v7. Snapshot takes the same time. Both of these are approx 5 times faster than it was with the above variable controlling the navigation.

So, if you are suffering from slow page generation/snapshot times AND ARE USING THE ABOVE VARIABLE on every page, it may be worth reconsidering and try using a hard coded navigation. It makes a huge difference!

[completerookie]

<actinic:block type="EntireSectionList" >

exactly where are we looking for this chunk of code please
I assume around the navigation?

[dave_finlayson]

Kevin,

Yes! This is not a standard Actinic way of setting up the navigation though. Unless you are using navigation set up similiar to the way in this thread:-

http://community.actinic.com/showthread.php?t=23159

then you will probably not be using this code.

[gabrielcrowe]

where's the "Server Side Include" switch to allow you to include it?

whats the syntax for SSI within the pages where you want your navigation to appear?

ta

be aware that this is an odd way to ahve your navigation, but if you feel brave then:

SSI is enabled at the server level, in your .htaccess file. you'll find this in the root of your webserver.

AddHandler server-parsed .html
AddHandler server-parsed .htm

adding these lines will enable every htm and html file to support includes, so this means that actinic htm pages will now support server side includes. Please be aware that this will effectively add extra server load, as every page of html is now parsed for dynamic content. It is possible to make htm files behave like php as well, so that you can add php in your actinic pages, but thats a different kettle of fish alltogether.

now, in your html. this code you can pull tricks like this:

<!--#echo var="DATE_LOCAL" -->

to display the date

This document last modified <!--#flastmod file="index.html" -->

the last modified date.

<!--#include virtual="/cgi-bin/counter.pl" -->

include a file, perl or otherwise.

try here for more help.
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/1.3/howto/ssi.html

Good luck.

[zmagyar]

You can include files without enabling SSI on the server just by using js. We have added a small function to our default js file to make it easy. You don't need to do anything else just include the HTML code below

<a rel="fragment" href="index.html">Alternate text</a>

at the place you would like your file to be included. Please note that the included file will not need to have the standard head/body tags (as they are already there by the including page).

BTW it is available in the advanced user guide.

[completerookie]

<a rel="fragment" href="index.html">Alternate text</a>

this doesn't seem to do the same thing.
when I experimented, I created a simple text file called "mypage.inc" - the contents simply said "the contents of mypage.inc"
then cut and pasted your code.

but all it did was to put an underlined link in the page which then oopened up mypage.inc when clicked. - this is NOT the same as SSI

[zmagyar]

The "Alternate text" only appears when you using a browser not supporting ajax or javascript is off.

Where did you paste it? actiniccore.js needs to be included in the page where you try to use it.