[TYPO3-project-formidable] General question on performance

[Thomas Schikarski]

Hi all,

many thanks for this mighty library! I'm very sure that it is well 
suited for a large number of web projects involving user interaction.

However, at the moment I work on a customer project that needs to have a 
fast user interface for data input as a central requirement. Users will 
have to enter a number of data sets one after the other without having 
to wait long between entering individual records.

So far, I used the "Simple CRU(D)" example as template and adopted some 
columns in the lister and edit fields in the edit/create form to fit my 
needs, using PHP user objects. Unfortunately, the user experience became 
quite slow now.

I did some tests by reading out TYPO3 parse time and FORMidable debug 
info. So far, I have the impression that the total TYPO3 parse time is 
between 1 and 2 seconds, whereas the browser needs between 3 and 6 
seconds from clicking to showing the result. FORMidable debug shows me 
somewhat more than 200 Milliseconds. So, it seems like the browser 
consumes most of the time for doing all the rendering and working 
through the client side code.

Here is my question: How is general experience with FORMidable with 
respect to performance? Is the behaviour described above untypically 
slow? If so, I probably will need to get some tips, how to improve 
performance.

I already read a list contribution that suggests to call _getListData() 
only once during the rendering process, instead of calling it in a 
number of child objects. Maybe, I also have to fine-tune the caching. 
However, my lister is bound to a search form, which makes caching 
impossible, as I learn from the list. Right?

In this special case, I would need strong confidence that I can get 
FORMidable to be as fast as a web application can be. Otherwise, I will 
have to think about a completely different approach, like building a 
Windows GUI for the data entry part. This would not harm the rest of the 
application that doesn't need to be especially fast.

So, I would be happy to get some general feedback.

Many thanks in advance,

Thomas