Performance Tuning in Theme Builder 3.x

Theme Builder is now used on some extremely large and popular wikis - both behind corporate firewalls, on the public Internet and even the world's largest privately owned hospital ship! As your wiki becomes more widely adopted, things that used to work quickly may start to become bottlenecks and your configuration of Theme Builder is no exception.

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• The average theme design now only uses 8 5 external JavaScript files instead of 11
• Several More resources (such as Custom CSS) will now be cached by the web browser for up to one year or until they are next modified (whichever is soonerare using Cache Expire (1 year)
• Theme layouts contain much more intelligent caching on the server to reduce processing time
• The default View and Edit menus are 3 times faster thanks to compound items
• We've waded through the Java, HTML, JavaScript and CSS with all manner of diagnostic tools and made huge numbers of improvements throughout the plugin
• We've refactored huge swathes of the Java code used in the plugin to make it cleaner, faster and more maintainable

... more to follow ...

Use fewer macros

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However, you probably wouldn't be adding macros to the layout if there wasn't a need for them. So what can you do to solve this dilemma? Well, there are a number of solutions...

Use the cache macro

The cache macro allows you to cache the output of a macro. On subsequent views of the same page, if a cache is found then it's used instead of reprocessing the macro (or other wiki notation encapsulated by the cache macro).

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• builder-show macro and builder-hide macro
• show-to macro and hide-from macro
• show-if macro and hide-if macro

Use compound menu items

If you use the menuitem macro, menulink macro and menuicon macro a lot, try converting your markup to use the new compound-menuitem macro which can reduce the number of macros used by one thirdtwo thirds (from 3 to 1)!

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Likewise, if you've imported a theme designed in an earlier version of Theme Builder, it'll be using the old menu notation that used a lot more macros.

See Also: View Menu 3.x and Edit Menu 3.x

Avoid CSS imports

In earlier versions of Theme Builder, it was difficult to have one master CSS file that would be used across multiple spaces so many of our clients created a css file and imported it in to the Custom CSS using the CSS @import directive.

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There are a range of macros that take advantage of widely used technology such as HTML (see html macro and html-include macro) and XSLT (see xslt macro), etc.

These generally require that you understand the syntax of whatever technology they offer, but require far less processing time on the server.

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Confluence allows you to create "User Macros" in the Administration Console. These allow you to more safely add raw HTML content to your wiki and also allow you to take advantage of the Velocity engine to perform basic scripting, etc.

Scriptix

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Note: This plugin requires the latest production version of Java (version 6) – which is not yet officially supported by Atlassian for use with Confluence. That being said, we're now using it on several sites.

Adaptavist's Scriptix plugin allows you to create server-side scripts in languages such as JavaScript, PHP (Quercus), Python (Jython) – in fact any scripting language listed here.

Because Scriptix uses the Java 6, it enables much tighter integration with Java and even allows compilation to byte code of PHP scripts – giving the potential to run even faster than mod_php.

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If you host or access the database and/or file system on another server using something like NAS, you'll likely be adding a huge amount of latency, compared to local storage, as a result. Instead of using remote file storage, look at pushing the attachments into the database and taking manual backups – this will substantially reduce the amount of size needed for the Confluence home directory (potentially multiple TB reduced to under a 100 MB).

If your wiki has become mission critical and you need expert advice, check out our Dedicated Hosting, Remote Hosting and Confluence Support solutions.

If you are just looking for some free quick-fire advice in the form of specific questions, which we can read, process and reply within 10 minutes; then we are more than happy to help. Just raise a question in General Support on our Tracking System.

Let us prove to you how useful our support services can be!

See Also

Most of the content of earlier performance tutorials are still applicable to Theme Builder 3.x:

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