Recently, we have been asked by a customer to perform some speed optimization on a heavy traffic Joomla website. After further investigations we came into the conclusion that routing all static content (images, CSS, Js) through apache webserver was opening too many connections and was one of the major causes of the website’s slowness . The most obvious solution would be to serve static content from a different subdomain pointing to the same IP where Joomla is hosted, routing all the static requests through a different and faster webserver (enginx or lighhttpd to cite a few)  would,  at the same time, speed up page rendering because the browser could parallelize requests to different domains. Unfortunately, Joomla does not support serving static content from a different (sub)domain,  so we started writing a plugin that allows us to serve static content from a different domain. We are now in the testing phase, the plugin will be open-sourced and GPL’d but we will probably require a small fee to download in order to cover development and assistance costs. If you are interested or have questions or ideas, please leave a comment below.

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