What's the optimal amount of queries an ExpressionEngine page should load?

Question

I saw @parscale tweet: How many queries are you happy with for a home page? When do you say this is Optimized?

I saw responses that < 50 is good, 30 or less is best, and 100+ is danger zone. Is there really any proper number? And if say you do have > 50 queries running on your pages, what are some ways to bring it down?

I generally have sites that run the gamut that are under 50 queries and some more, though the "more" don't seem to be too slow, I'm always interested in making it faster. How?

Answer 1

How to reduce queries will vary from site to site, template to template, but there's been a few articles on EE optimisation and performance:

http://expressionengine.com/wiki/Reduce_Queries/
http://expressionengine.com/blog/entry/troubleshooting_site_performance_issues/
http://www.netmagazine.com/tutorials/optimise-your-expressionengine-site
http://www.leezilla.net/post/12377053779/ab-seeing-your-sites-performance
http://eeinsider.com/articles/using-cache-wisely-with-expressionengine/

But if you've done all that and still need to speed things up, then your next step is to look at add-ons like CE Cache.

Answer 2

Thing to remember is not all queries are created equal. You can have 1,000 queries that do very little in the way of impacting performance, or a single query that can slow everything way down.

In EE its actually better to look at the template debug output and identify key slow down spots in the template build then to always focus on just the query count.

As others have pointed out products like CE Cache, Solspace's Template Morsels, or even adding a varnish caching server in-front of an intensive EE web site can do wonders, though with the added work required to fully get a varnish setup in front of EE setup, I would currently stick to the other solutions/directions first.