This article is the first in a three-part series on eZ Publish performance. Performance optimization involves assessing existing site capabilities, identifying problems and implementing solutions. This first article will introduce basic performance terminology and discuss tools to benchmark your site's performance.

The latter two articles will outline eZ Publish debugging and provide practical solutions for optimizing performance.

Throughout this series, we will focus on configuration and setup changes that can be done within eZ Publish. This does not include the hosting environment, typically consisting of Apache, MySQL, PHP and APC, which is also important for eZ Publish performance. See the related articles about the server environment, MySQL, clustering and server architecture for information about tuning the hosting environment.