Performance Recommendations for High Traffic Sites

Here are a few recommendations for high-traffic deployments in which most users are anonymous. Anonymous users tend to visit merely to read content rather than contribute. Because they’re anonymous, by default there’s very little about their experience that will be customized. As a result, you can typically afford to serve them cached content rather than freshly rendered dynamic content.

• Recognize anonymous users from the cookies the application sets. These cookies are available in 1.x versions as of 1.10.3 and in version 2.0.1, but are unavailable in version 2.0. If you’re using a version in which they’re not available, you should consider upgrading.
  • The application sets a jive.user.loggedIn cookie whose value is true if the user is registered and logged in.
  • Use the jive.server.info cookie to preserve consistency between user requests. This cookie contains information about the server from which the user receive content. Its value might be:

    serverName=myhost:serverPort=8080:contextPath=/our-community:localName=myhost:localPort=8080:localAddr=127.0.0.1

• Offload page caching to dedicated cached-content servers. With large numbers of anonymous users, you should consider using a content delivery network (CDN) such as Akamai or Limelight to serve cached content to anonymous users.
• Avoid sending a max age page cache header back to the client if the anonymous user will be able to log in. If the browser caches the page, then the newly logged in user might not receive fresh dynamic content.
• Consider caching resources such as CSS, Javascript, and decorator image files, which tend to rarely change. In fact, consider caching these resources for days if you expect not to be deploying new versions of them.
• Use the Query Stats feature to track database queries. The Query Stats page of the admin console can display SQL statements executed, how often they’re executed, and how long the query takes. The number of queries you see when browsing your front pages should be low. For more information about this feature, see Examining Database Queries.
• When you have a large percentage of anonymous users but the overall number of page views is smaller, use the application's built-in server-side page caching. Starting with version 2.0.0, the application can Server-Side Page Caching. You can enable the cache and set maximum age and expiration thresholds.