Builder - Performance Tuning

Builder is a highly visual theme which contains several javascripts, images and other components to render pages. This page lists various ways to improve the performance of the theme on your Confluence installation.

Resource Servlet Caching

Issue: Menu takes up to 20 seconds to load
Affects: All versions of Builder running on Confluence 2.1.x

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From Confluence 2.2 onwards, our recommended alterations have become part of Confluence which will massively improve performance of the servlet for a wide range of plugins.

Solution

If you are using Confluence 2.1.x, it is possible to manually apply a patch if you have access to a friendly Java developer - for more information, please see our Conditional GET patch instructions.

If you are unable to apply this patch manually, consider upgrading to 2.2 which includes this patch as standard.

Workaround

If you are unable to apply the patch of upgrade Confluence, an alternative is to upgrade Builder to version 1.5.4 or above which has a feature to turn off icons in the view and edit menus.

View/Edit Menu Icons

Issue: Menus take up to 4 seconds to load in Firefox browser
Affects: All versions of Builder accessed via Firefox browser

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In order to resolve this issue, additional patches will be required to the Resources Servlet (some of which are described in this comment), however these have not yet been implemented or tested.

Workaround

Prior to a patch being available for Confluence, you can upgrade to Builder 1.5.4 or above which has an option to turn off the menu icons on the view and edit menus thus avoiding this delay.

Slow Automated Menus

Issue: Automated menus, created with macros, can sometimes be slow
Affects: All versions of Builder and Confluence

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As we added more and more macro sections and tutorials, the "Macros" menu became huge and started to make page rendering in our user guide slower and slower.

Solution

There is no specific solution, other than to limit the size of the menus generated with macros. Obviously, that depends on which macros you are using.

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Remember: The bigger your menus get (number of items), the slower they get.

Footer Content Speed

Issue: Some macros in the page footer can slow down page rendering
Affects: Clients who use resource-intensive macros in the footer

If you use macros within footers, extra processing will usually be required on the server whilst those macros go off and get additional information from the database, etc.

Solution

Use the cache macro (available here) to cache your footer.

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