Tweaking magento for performance

Question

i\'m looking on performance (server load time) of magento site and i\'m trying to tune search result pages. I realized that when I disabled all heavy things like top navigat

Answer 1

First you need to audit and optimize time to first byte (TTFB).

Magento has profiler built-in that will help you identify unoptimized code blocks.

Examine your template files and make sure you DO NOT load product models inside a loop (common performance hog):

foreach($collection as $_product){
   $_product = Mage::getModel('catalog/product')->load($_product->getId()

I see this code often in product/list.phtml

I wrote a step-by-step article on how to optimize TTFB

Disclaimer: the link points to my own website