I did a site load speed test using the Firebug plugin for Firefox on several of the ViArt homepage templates. The program ranks pages #/100 and the best one I could find was a 46/100. My current active site (table based on the same server) is 57/100. I was hoping that when I changed to ViArt, speed would be improved. Any idea why it would be slower or any thoughts on this subject in general?
 
Thanks!
 

Was wondering that myself. Could it be the new encrypting on the cart?

I think Viart needs to remove/deprecate the PHP4 code from its core.
 
And just support PHP 5 onwards.
 
A lot of major brands have dumped PHP4 and moved on to PHP 5 as the minimum.

Hi All
"Page Speed" by Google is recommended to increase the speed of loading pages
 
For versions 3.6 and 4.0 "Page Speed Score" approximately equal
 
If You want to change them - please follow the recommendations by Google

I posted a similar issue myself the other day, this needs to be addressed. I am fairly confident that it is cased by the replacement optimization system. Zend Opt is proven... I don't see why it was removed the speed loss is rather big.
 
http://www.viart.com/4_x_very_slow_compared_to_3_x.html

Add the following code to your .htaccess file. It will compress the output from server thus increasing speed.
 
AddType application/x-httpd-php .php .htm .html .phtml
 
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/plain
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/css
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/javascript
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-javascript
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-httpd-php

I used the following site:
 
http://www.cssdrive.com/index.php/main/csscompressor/
 
It compresses the CSS code to create smaller file sizes.
 
Use karakash's method for your .htaccess file. This works well with shared hosting services.
 
Finally, if you are on a shared server, consider a VPS. This will actually open more ways to speed your site directly from the server without much code modification. However, it does require changing files.

karakash,
 
Does it matter where in the .htaccess file you add the code? I tried it at the beginning and then the end, but both times got this error...
 
Internal Server Error
The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.
Please contact the server administrator, webmaster@cdkenterprises.com and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.
 
More information about this error may be available in the server error log.
 
 
Additionally, a 500 Internal Server Error error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.
 
???