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Optimizations

This section is intended to describe some tips & tricks to Optimize the CiviCRM Setup

Smarty

Disable Compile Check

By default CiviCRM is set to TRUE the Smarty option compile_check, which forces to recompile Smarty templates on every call. Recompiling does not need to happen unless a template or config file is changed. Typically you enable this during development, and disable for production. To disable this in CiviCRM, edit this constant in civicrm.settings.php :

define('CIVICRM_TEMPLATE_COMPILE_CHECK', FALSE);

Smart Group Performance

Depending on the number of smart groups you have on your system this may help with the performance of your instance. It is recommended that you set the smart_group_cache_refresh_mode to be deterministic rather than opportunistic. The latter will cause Smart Groups to be rebuilt during an HTTP request on certain areas of the system which may slow down user experience. Deterministic cache refreshing will mean that you will need to set up a scheduled job to trigger the job job.group_cache_flush to trigger the smart group cache clearing. It is also recommended that the smart group cache timeout be set to something around 5-10 minutes.

Exclude dirs that do not need to be scanned

This was introduced in 5.29.

CiviCRM has a utility called CRM_Utils_File::findFiles() which is used to locate various glob patterns of file, such as *.info files to find extensions and *.xml files etc. By default this will search every directory under the docroot, except those that begin with a dot, e.g. .git. However, there are a number of directories that may be large but will never contain things CiviCRM is looking for, so you can improve the efficiency of this process by excluding them.

You do this by providing a regex in a constant called CIVICRM_EXCLUDE_DIRS_PATTERN in your civicrm.settings.php file. The regex will be used to match on file system absolute paths, e.g. /var/www/example.org/sites/default/files/civicrm/ext.

For example, you might consider (if it makes sense in your environment) the following, which would exclude:

  • All dirs starting with a dot (.git, .svn, .secret, .env etc.)
  • All node_modules dirs - these can be enormous.
  • All js and css dirs - if you're sure CiviCRM doesn't need to look in there (it doesn't as of 5.29)
  • All bower_components and packages and vendor dirs - these contain 3rd party library code.
  • The sites/default/files/private dir, which is a local example that might be where Drupal's private managed files are kept.
<?php
if (!defined('CIVICRM_EXCLUDE_DIRS_PATTERN')) {
   define('CIVICRM_EXCLUDE_DIRS_PATTERN', '@/(\.|node_modules|js/|css/|bower_components|packages/|vendor/|sites/default/files/private)@');
}

Depending on a lot of local factors, this can speed up cache clears, extension installs etc. significantly (e.g. 10× faster has been measured).