How to Speed Up CodeIgniter App?

Last updated on January 17, 2018

We can improve Codeigniter application speed with simple tactics. I will show very simple steps, which will improve your CI app speed.

Enable Gzip Compression
Enable full page Cache
Enable HTML output Compress
leverage browser caching

Enable Gzip Compression

Go to application/config/config.php, Then Enable Gzip compression by setting compress_output value to TRUE in ci config array.

 $config['compress_output'] = TRUE;

Enable full page Cache

We can Enable full page Cache to entire Controller by calling $this->output->cache(30); in the controller constructor, or we enable it in function level by calling with in the method.

Full page Cache system create a Cached version of the HTML page in cache folder,

Cache folder should be writable by the web server

$this->output->cache(30); 
// Will expire in 30 minutes

Enable HTML output Compress

we gonna use CodeIgniter Hooks to minify HTML output, go to application/hooks/ create a file called compress.php, copy past the below code.

function compress()
{
 $CI =& get_instance();
 $buffer = $CI->output->get_output();
 
 $search = array(
    '/>[^S ]+/s', 
    '/[^S ]+',
     '<',
     '\1',
  "//<![CDATA[n".'1'."n//]]>"
  );
 $buffer = preg_replace($search, $replace, $buffer);
 $CI->output->set_output($buffer);
 $CI->output->_display();
}

till now we have created a hook function, now we have to declare it hooks config go to application/config/hook.php

$hook['display_override'][] = array(
	'class' => '',
	'function' => 'compress',
	'filename' => 'compress.php',
	'filepath' => 'hooks'
	);

The final step is going to application/config/config.php file, in the config array, enable hooks.