Litespeed Cache

Hi

I have been advised by the hosting company to install the LItespeed Cache plugin for Joomla. Has anybody else here used this with Hikashop, if so, how did they set up the configuration?

Thanks

David

Hello David,

You'll probably get a better and faster answer by asking it to the Litespeed cache community :
www.litespeedtech.com/support/forum/

Kind regards,
Mohamed

Hi Mohamed

thanks for the reply. I did look at the forums and there is very little info on there in reference to Hikashop, only one post www.litespeedtech.com/support/forum/threads/hikashop.18572/ . I also tried to sign up and that is failing and not working properly.

Thanks

David

@davec:

Hi,

In the Litespeed Forum post you linked to, you see reference to the LiteSpeed Cache plugin for Joomla, which can be downloaded here: www.litespeedtech.com/products/cache-plu.../joomla-acceleration

In the forum thread you also see what the poster "Niallo" entered in the plugin's "Exclude Rules" tab entered. If you followed this and the plugin documentation by modifying the rules to match your cart and checkout pages, you should get this to work as well. Try and test... regarding HikaShop it's usually really only the cart and checkout which are affected, if at all.

In case of trouble:
- post in the thread on Litespeed Forum (eventually contact Lightspeed in case of registration problems persisting)
- contact your hosting support

Hi

I have tried contacting Litespeed via Twitter and now email, no reply. Pretty poor support really.

I use a company that advised me to use the plugin and it just seems to have various quirks which I shouldn't really have to spend time on. Even on a basic site I experienced issues with the plugin so implementing it on a busy eCommerce site is not an option.

Thanks

David

Hi again,

You don't say what those various quirks and issues are you're experiencing with the Litespeed Cache plugin for Joomla. However, it appears that it's being maintained (see github.com/litespeedtech/lscache-joomla -- last updated 4 days ago),
Also, the plugin requires proper setup (including at least one modification of .htaccess), and yours is not known, either.

Please note: I'm not saying "it's your fault" or so.
However, it's safe to say that the issues you're facing are not caused by HikaShop, either. It's all too common that, by default, certain server caches result in shopping carts and other dynamic content not being updated... without special cache control (such as possible with Litespeed cache and the Joomla plugin for it) you'd have the same, or at least similar, problems with Virtuemart or other shopping carts, certain functionality of CCKs and similar components as well.


About your case: obviously, you're dealing with a bottleneck somewhere. If your hosting company is recommending to engage their server cache, it's typically for one of these two reasons:
(1) You just want to "generally improve pageload speed", or
(2) you are hitting server resource limits set by your hosting package and are looking for tools or tricks to be able to stay within those limits.

Server cache can definitely help with (1), but for (2) it will be only a bandaid, not fixing the problem at its root.
In any case, if you want or need to get the Litespeed (= server) cache to work, you'll likely need to spend more time on getting the plugin set up. Unfortunately, there is no "one for all" or "plug & play" solution for this; it takes learning and eventually some tinkering.
If it's (2): to avoid the root cause, you may want to consider hosting that "busy eCommerce site" on a more performant server with enough headroom for the task, plus then having cache options for additional gains in speed.

But now I went really far off topic here (sorry for that -- just trying to help!) as, again, none of this is caused by or directly related to HikaShop, indeed.

Hi @lousyfool

Thanks very much for your information/explanation.

The hosting resources are being hit sometimes and a Boost has now been applied so we can see if the issue is resolved.

I added the plugin to a smaller site and one quirk was all of the CSS was stripped so ended up with a home page which was white and no formatting. All restored after clearing cache. The page has a Hikashop Content Module below content. The changes to the htaccess file were made as well.

There certainly is no one for all solution.

I have now managed to sign-up for the LightSpeed forums. I had to use my mobile network as it failed to work on my broadband connection, IP number blacklisted with them. Will be raising a ticket in due course with the suppliers support. I will look at loading the more recent version of LiteSpeed and test it on my own site.

Thanks again for you info

David