I have had recurring performance issues with Atahualpa, some seemingly related to poor hosting, yet I have found Atahualpa consistantly under-performs good commercial themes like Thesis. See for example the YSlow reports on the following site:

http://www.byobwebsite.com/subscribe-to-our-site/
a fairly heavily "loaded" Thesis site (Wishlist, Simple Press etc)



Compared to my Atahualpa site
http://wpacademy.tv/members
(note the outer pages are done with WP SPire plugin, this is the inner page done in Atahualpa)



Notice that the Thesis site has 300k of "empty cache" requests, compared to my 500k (with the same or less content) and, what is even more disturbing, their 10k of "primed cache" requests, vs my 40k. I am particularly worried about the 24k of dynamically-generated CSS in Atahualpa, that seems must be downloaded and parsed at every page load.

So the question -- Is Atahualpa too "heavy" for commercial sites?

Has there been any work on Atahualpa performance and optimization? Is anyone willing to bid me on doing some work on this (and then put the work back into the public theme)? I would rather do this than simply switch to Thesis, as I have gotten so much value from the theme and from the community

Note that I haven't analyzed this with W3 Total Cache and CDN yet, but as far as I know the 24k dynamic CSS download would remain. (I will doing it now and post an update maybe)

Notice that the Thesis site has 300k of "empty cache" requests, compared to my 500k (with the same or less content)

103.8 KB is due to a plugin you are using 'jw-player-plugin'

how many plugins are you using? how many are they using?

THanks Juggleddad that's good to know about JWPlayer. I think these are both pretty heavily-loaded sites. THe main issue I am concerned about is the 24k of Atahualpa stylesheet reloaded at every new page,

<link rel="stylesheet" href="http://wpacademy.tv/?bfa_ata_file=css" type="text/css" media="all" />

Can this be given a far-expire header for example, that would help a lot. I am not a performance optimization guy by any means so not sure what to do here.

Other part of my question, my intuition is that Atahualpa is slower and heavier than other themes, but don't have any hard evidence of this, other than results above. The above results are for download sizes, they do not speak to the processing needs of the theme. I have no idea whether this has any impact or not.

All right I put w3 cache and CDN, results much much improved, now down to 10k of "primed cache" requests, see



but I am still concerned about the CSS (I may be wrong but I imagine this is the reason Atahualpa occurs as slower than other sites), can we make a far-expire header on this, or figure out how to put in CDN, I am sure that would greatly help, I will pay for this.

try adding this to the .htaccess file

# ==========================================================
# set the ExpiresActive
# ==========================================================
ExpiresActive on  
ExpiresDefault "access plus 10 day"  
ExpiresByType image/gif "access plus 2 years"  
ExpiresByType image/jpg "access plus 2 years"  
ExpiresByType image/png "access plus 2 years"  
ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access plus 2 years"  
ExpiresByType text/javascript "access plus 2 years"  
ExpiresByType application/x-javascript "access plus 2 years"  
ExpiresByType text/css "access plus 2 years"  
ExpiresByType text/html "access plus 1 day"  
ExpiresByType text/plain "access plus 1 day"  
ExpiresByType application/x-shockwave-flash "access plus 2 years"

Thanks Juggledad. But what if I change my stylesheet, can I reset expire headers?

I'm just giving you some hints I found doing a google search. I'm no apache performance expert.

Here is another site I found you might want to read http://www.askapache.com/htaccess/sp...s-caching.html

Problem solved, I activated Browser Cache on W3 Total Cache, all CSS and javascript getting cached now and I'm down to 4k on a primed cache request. This is an amazing plugin by the way, and free on top of everything.