Description

By default, in Joomla, the type of menu item for the main page is featured articles. Few people know, but this page is one of the heaviest, loaded in terms of page formation in the basic components of Joomla.

What is it for?

In order for the main page of the site not to "slow down". The component allows you to bind an empty output to the page, which does not create a load for either the database or the page render. Most often this is required on the main page of the site or on special landing pages. By default, Joomla has featured articles linked to the main page. Few people know, but this page is one of the most loaded pages in the basic components of Joomla.

Why can't we do with template tools?

• Not all templates support disabling component output on a specific page.
• Not all templates allow you to safely implement the necessary edits to disable component output without losing edits when the component or template is possibly updated.
• Not all webmasters are able to make the necessary edits to the template.

Who needs it for?

For sites with heavy loads. Under heavy loads for different projects and different market niches, you can understand different figures. But I have often heard among developers that figures up to 10,000 unique users per day are not loads. We assume in our mind that each unique visitor will look at at least 1.5-2 pages and get 15-20 thousand views.

When rendering a page of selected materials, the user's access rights are checked, requests to the database are made, which increases both memory consumption and page rendering time. Nothing happens in this component of an empty page, so the resource consumption for the main page is reduced.

Test results

Site template - Cassiopeia. Joomla 5.0.0. On page 3 of the module: JL Content fields filter, bread crumbs and menus. There are no featured articles, that is, the request to the database returned an empty value. There are 4 articles in the database in total.

Local server, Open Server. PHP 8.1.9, MySQL 8.0.30. Operating system - Windows 10.

Menu item type - Featured articles

When testing the main page with the "featured articles" type (which in fact there were none), the page rendering took an average of 370ms to 400ms and 18.188 MB of memory. Memory consumption was consistently the same. The rendering time varied from 267 m s to 497ms, but most often the number fell in the range of 370-400ms.

Menu item type - Blank page

Memory consumption - 16,309 MB stable, unchanged. The page rendering time varied from 264ms to 420ms, but most often the number fell into the range of 290ms-340ms.