Is OpenAtrium really slow?

Question

I am a user of an OpenAtrium site, but not the admin. On average it takes anywhere from 7 - 11 seconds for the front page to load. Going from page-to-page takes about 7 seconds.

I am not really a Drupal admin and I definitely do not have access to the host control panel or anything for this particular site.

The admin has mentioned something about cache and has cleared the cache to make it faster, but it still is very slow (see above). This site is not on it's own dedicated server and probably won't be moved to one in the near future. That being said, is there anything that can be done (i.e. anything I can recommend to the admin) that would improve it's speed in the near future?

Answer 1

Yes, it's a stupid question.

If you're running it on a shared host with no memory, don't have a PHP code cache (e.g. APC or similar), and don't have Apache tuned, then it's probably slow.

If, on the other hand, you are running it on a Mercury optimized VPS image, it's going to be fast.

Answer 2

We have it installed on our internal server (CentOS) on a tweaked LAMP setup. It's rather nice. I have not experienced any slowness in it.

Answer 3

We also have it on an internal CentOS server, LAMP, with XCache and it's an improvement over Amazon CentOS LAMP VPS with no XCache.

http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/howto-rhel-install-xcahce-php-opcode-cacher/