Fantastic - Two Suggestions

[sthong]

First off- Steve - this is a fantastic product! Kudos to you!

Two suggestions:
1. Put a save button at the top of the form for all new/edit screens (similar to how it is on the bottom of the form). If you have large records (think 50 fields) - and you modify the first field, it takes a long time to scroll all the way to the bottom

2. Performance - At least on our server, it doesn't run very quickly. Is there some way it could be sped up? For daily maintenance of records - any performance gain would be substantial in improving productivity.

Thanks again for a fantastic product!

[shannah]

Hi Steven,

Thanks for the comments.

1. I'll consider this.Ê One thing that you can do to deal with this is to just hit enter from any of the fields.. that will submit the form.

2. Performance is a tricky thing.Ê On our systems page generation generally takes between 0.1 and 0.4 seconds based on about 10 requests per second.Ê This is acceptable to me - and our servers aren't tremendously fast.Ê If you are experiencing worse performance than that there might be some kind of configuration problem. Some things that we have run across in the past:

Using Views substantially slows things down.

Be very careful with what you put inside getPermissions() methods.Ê These methods will be called many many times, so keep them trim.

If you run across other performance bottlenecks please let me know.

There is an experimental caching feature that may help you out.Ê You can enable the cache by adding the following to your conf.ini file:

[_output_cache]
enabled=1

The way the cache works is it caches the HTML pages in a table of the database (__output_cache) that it automatically creates.Ê It is smart enough to refresh the cache whenever a table that is in use is updated.Ê It is also smart enough to NOT cache POST requests.Ê Each cache record is specific to a user and language, so different users will not affect each others' caches.

I have experienced gains from 2 to 10 times using the cache.Ê However there are certain things to be aware of - as with any caching.Ê TheÊ cache only gets refreshed if the modification time of the database is newer than the cache.Ê This means that if you make changes to the soure files or templates, the cache won't automatically be refreshed until you update a record in the database.Ê You can manually clear the cache by emptying the __output_cache table.

Best regards

Steve