After the release of your 1.5 easygate template, I have to say that I still prefer the older infogate template. Infogate is simply put much faster ! In firebug, it gets a rate of 63 and it generates only 24 http requests, while easygate gets a rate of 43 and has 123 http requests...Don't get me wrong, I love your work..but I really need a fast loading design. Furthermore, I don't like the fixed width of the top menu bar in easygate, but that's just personal...

So I would like to know if it's possible to get a 1.5 version of infogate. Would this conversion be a easy task for a third party or could you guys from bonusthemes do it ? and what would it cost me then ?

By the way, I think a lot of people would like to have a 1.5 version of infogate...maybe a kind of bonus of bonesthemes ???

Thanks in advance,

bas.

Hi again basvanoord,

It happens that I am a performance maniac myself but until now I didn't made any comparative benchmark to Infogate. Perhaps because I know the internal mechanism and I have the confidence that it is as fast as it can get with the given amount of technology behind it.

Well.. I wanted to answer your post after some background checking. There is an obvious answer for me to say but I enjoy benchmarks myself. The obvious answer I had for you is that Easygate has many more styling options than Infogate and all of them are displayed on the front-page of the demo. This is on purpose, because we want to show people how many styling options you can use. In a normal setup you wouldn't need to display all of those module suffixes and group styles, so the 123 http requests can drop to a minimum. It is generally not a good idea to measure from demos. Demos are all about capabilities, not performance.

What worries me more is the optimization of the PHP script that gives life to this template. I run some benchmarks and I didn't like the result much, but I think they are interesting. The tests run from CLI to local requests to Apache 2, PHP 5 and MySQL 5. NO CACHING OR OPTIMIZERS WERE USED. Each test run in 1000 iterations so that the result in seconds equals the result in milliseconds for one iteration.

The first test was on templates that had absolutely nothing else than the header and the main body. No surrounding HTML, no CSS, no images, just header and main body. In Joomla! 1.0.15 that test run in 58 msec and in Joomla! 1.5.6 in 115 msec. So, regardless of what template you use Joomla! 1.5 needs almost twice the time of Joomla! 1.0.

The second test was Joomla! 1.0.15 with Infogate and Joomla! 1.5.6 with Easygate. In order to have a objective result I isolated it from extras, so I unpublished all modules with one exception. I let CMenu for Easygate because the corresponding menu in Infogate cannot be turned off. So, again, you have the templates with their basic layout mechanisms. Infogate run in 60 msec and Easygate in 125 msec. If you remove the Joomla! overhead you have 2 msec for Infogate and 10 msec for Easygate.

To sum up, you are right, Infogate is faster but only by a tiny amount of milliseconds. Given the technology Easygate offers, I really think it is pointless to go back to Infogate. In a very busy server you would most probably use a PHP optimizer or a caching system so that amount of time goes towards 0. As I said before the http requests are because of the visible styles (for modules and groups), and that can also be much lower in a realistic environment.

The result of all this is really that Joomla! needs to do some serious optimization work on the Joomla! core.

If you still want to have Infogate for Joomla! 1.5, we could offer that for you at a cost. We can discuss this in private.

Hi Alex

I think you are right about the difference in performance between joomla 1.0 and 1.5. So if I use a 1.5 version of infogate, it might get slower then on your demo ?

Anyway, I will consider again my options and I will take a closer look on easygate. The http requests for easygate drops on the other pages besides the homepage to around 46-60, so that's a more reasonable amount. And after caching the loading speed of easygate is indeed not bad at all.

By the way, I am glad bonusthemes gives a lot of attention to the performance of their templates. Keep up the good work !

bas.

Regarding your question, I am not sure.. I guess it will probably be a little slower due to the new Joomla! core. But I think this shouldn't worry you much because I think the Joomla! dev team will eventually make it faster.

Thanks for your comments. BonusThemes is a team of perfectionists

We always try to combine quality with fast performance. But sometimes due to the speciality of some templates we don't manage to give the convenient result as fast as we would like. Nevertheless, you will always find a fresh idea in bonusthemes and that's our target.