Configuration options#

There are multiple configuration options across Silverstripe CMS that can help to improve your performance, particularly for projects with large datasets.

Some relevant configuration properties are specifically outlined in the ORM Performance section or in documentation for specific modules and won't be repeated below.

Note that this is not an exhaustive list of configuration options that could improve performance, but we think these are worth explicitly calling out.

Disable dynamic archive page message#

When you archive a page, the message that is displayed in the dialog box is dynamically generated based on whether the page has any descendants among other things. For pages with many descendants, this can be slow.

The dynamic functionality can be disabled by setting CMSMain.enable_dynamic_archive_warning_message to false, falling back to a hardcoded message instead.

CopySilverStripe\CMS\Controllers\CMSMain:
  enable_dynamic_archive_warning_message: false

Hierarchy node thresholds#

For the site tree in the /admin/pages section as well as in TreeDropdownField, the number of records that will be loaded initially relies on two configuration properties:

• Hierarchy.node_threshold_total: The lower bound of nodes to load. Note that all root nodes will always be loaded - this configuration used to determine whether to also load child nodes.
• Hierarchy.node_threshold_leaf: Maxiumum number of child nodes to load. Usually if a node has more children than this limit, its children won't be loaded.

If you find that loading the site tree is a bottleneck, you may find setting these values lower can help. Note that they need to be set on the relevant class, not Hierarchy itself. For the site tree that's SiteTree. For TreeDropdownField set TreeDropdownField.node_threshold_total instead. There is no corresponding configuration to node_threshold_leaf for TreeDropdownField.

Dropdown field threshold#

When scaffolding form fields for a has_one relation, and for many_many or has_many relations containing Member records, the DBForeignKey.dropdown_field_threshold configuration property determines whether to lazy-load records and how many records to display per search request.

For models with extremely large datasets (in the many hundreds of thousands or more) even a count query can become slow. In those cases, you may want to skip the count query and tell the field to always lazy-load. You can do that by setting DBForeignKey.dropdown_field_threshold to 0.

CopySilverStripe\ORM\FieldType\DBForeignKey:
  dropdown_field_threshold: 0

Previous and next in GridFieldDetailForm#

The Previous and Next actions on the edit form inside a GridField are visible by default. These require getting finding this record's location in the pagination and fetching its previous and next records.

For models with extremely large datasets (in the many hundreds of thousands or more), pagination queries can become slow. For those cases you may want to disable these actions.

This can be done globally with the GridFieldDetailForm_ItemRequest.formActions YAML configuration:

CopySilverStripe\Forms\GridField\GridFieldDetailForm_ItemRequest:
  formActions:
    showPagination: false

It can also be done per GridField:

Copyuse SilverStripe\Forms\GridField\GridFieldDetailForm;
$gridfield->getConfig()->getComponentByType(GridFieldDetailForm::class)->setShowPagination(false);

Allow empty folders#

If you have many thousands of files in a folder, and especially if you're using a service like AWS S3 instead of the filesystem to manage assets, checking if a folder is empty in order to delete it can be slow.

If you find that's a bottleneck for you, you can allow empty folders to remain by setting the FlysystemAssetStore.keep_empty_dirs YAML configuration to true.

CopySilverStripe\Assets\Flysystem\FlysystemAssetStore:
  keep_empty_dirs: true