CI-based Web Sites Performance

[eluser]tonanbarbarian[/eluser]
If you want to get some real performance data on your CI site turn on the profiler
in your controller put the following code

Code:

$this->output->enable_profiler(true);

This will display the execution time for CI, which is a better indication of speed than "it took less than a second to download" because download speed is subjective depending on your internet connection, the servers internet connection and the load on the server.

The profiler also shows all queries that were run, and the get and post variables, and in CI 1.6 it will show the memory used, if your PHP is complied with memory limiting enabled.

This gives you a good idea as to how well your site is running.
On modest hardware you should find your execution times way less than 1 seconds, in fact they may even be less than .1 seconds, but it all depends on what you are doing in code.

If you want even more information about what your site is doing add the following code to the end of your index.php file

Code:

echo '<pre>'.print_r(get_included_files(), true).'</pre>'

This will list out each of the files loaded. Ideally you want the number of files loaded to be as small as possible it you want the best performance. If coded properly then CI is good at this. So do not use autoload unless you really need it, instead tell CI to load things only as you need them, and do not worry about trying to load the same thing more than once, CI handles that correctly. If you do this you may find that your number of included files goes down, which should also improve memory and execution time.