dear community,
we are evaluating liferay portal server (tomcat6 bundle on jdk5) for the implementation of a rather big finance portal ;
until now we were very impressed by all the out of the box functionality liferay provides.
we have a decent machine running only the liferay portal server. delivery of simple pages sometimes needs more than 10 seconds (with only one user!)
the attached diagram shows (via the TamperData Extension) how firefox loads all the necessary resources for a simple portal page (a page with the invitation portlet, the forum portlet and the calendar portlet on it);
the delivery time of the html (469ms) is ok.
but it's when the browser loads all the js and css files that the user has to wait for about 5 seconds to see any page content, and another 2.5 seconds are necessary until all remaining resources are loaded.
this makes navigating through the portal a real pain.
there are about 80 resources, mostly static content and the browser issues a conditional get request for most of them, and has to wait for the response, the 304 tells the browser "resource has not changed, take it from the cache";
as all these resources are rather small, the savings are not that big, about 30% compared to a full reload of all the page resources (by typing ctrl-F5)
is there a concept on how to optimize the user expierience and to shorten these page load times?
would it help to use expiration headers, merge/compress javascript, let apache webserver deliver static content?
btw, i get similar results when looking at demo.liferay.net;
thx for any advice,
fusel!
Answer