Serendipity Forums

Hi,
I have installed Serendipity, to evaluate it, using sqlite:

http://bkhome.org/serendipity/

Testing speed here:

https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/

Returns rather poor values, in particular, server response time of 1.2 seconds.

This is a new shared account, on a new host, omnis.com, and I have been testing other blogs and cms's. Mostly they have faster server response times, the poorest were about 0.5 seconds, best under 0.2.

Is it because I am using sqlite? I did the test with only the default plugins.

In admin panel, there is a checkbox to turn on a cache. Ticked that, refreshed the blog a few times, went to the google speed test, and got a worse result.

Any suggestions how I can speed up that server response time?

In case anyone is interested, the blog that I have used for years is a tiny perl script (just one file), derived from PPLOG. I still have it running, on my hostgator.com shared account:

http://barryk.org/news/

Google gives this 95/100, which is incredible.

It does have security issues, which forced me to disable comments (any Perl coders reading this?!), which is one reason I am looking to using a new blog script.

BarryK wrote:Returns rather poor values, in particular, server response time of 1.2 seconds.

When I just opened that URL for the first time, I could literally see those 1.2 seconds.

Something you should know about PageSpeed Insights, though:

– The rules that this test applies may or may not be relevant here. This is a fresh installation, and it's measured with standards that are also being applied to huge sites that have grown over the years.
– It is very hard to even get a score of over 90 in this test (on the desktop side of it). Getting 77 out of the box is not that bad.

That being said it might be SQLite (I have zero experience with that on web servers, not idea if that is slower than MySQL or not), it might be something else. However, in my test just now, I got 0.76 seconds, so you may have already changed something in the meantime.

Which version of PHP is this running on – still 5.x or 7.x? (7.x is a lot faster usually.)

BarryK wrote:In case anyone is interested, the blog that I have used for years is a tiny perl script (just one file), derived from PPLOG. […] Google gives this 95/100, which is incredible.

Not really. PPLOG generates static HTML. That alone is a speed advantage.

YL

yellowled wrote:Which version of PHP is this running on – still 5.x or 7.x? (7.x is a lot faster usually.)

It is PHP 7.1.7

SQLite can be a great option, but it depends on your hoster. If the disk access is slow sqlite will be slow as well. In those cases changing to MariaSQL or Postgres will help a lot.

But serendipity is also just not the fastest blogging engine. There are some heavy sql queries at the core of it. That's why caching does help a lot. Caching could be activated in older versions via the simplecache plugin. In 2.1.1 it is also in the configuration, but depending on your plugins it is a bit buggy. The current git master includes fixes for those, but is not stable in other areas.

So, in a gist: I'd try a different database engine, and then add caching with the next release.