[TYPO3-mvc] filter and pagination views of own extension really slow

[Daniel Hirth]

Hi guys, 

we are having performance issues with an extbase extension, so i was not sure in which forum to post this thread, but since this seems to me like a rather extbase-specific problem i chose this forum. If this was the wrong choice, please feel free to move this thread. 

Our setup is this: 

We wrote an extbase extension to (in short) display events. The event-model can contain instances of other models, e.g. location or gallery (with multiple instances of an image-model per gallery) . 

Currently, there are around ~3700 event-items stored and available in the backend. The TYPO3 version used is 6.1.7.

In the event list view in the frontend, the user can filter events by date (from ... till) and by location: 

<f:form object="{filter}" name="filter" method="post" action="list" noCache="1">
..
</f:form>

The filter object is used in the repository class to add constraints to the repository query. The resulting events are paginated with the paginate object. 

<f:widget.paginate objects="{events}" as="pageevents" configuration="{itemsPerPage:settings.itemsPerPage, insertAbove:1, insertBelow:1, maximumNumberOfLinks:settings.pagerMaxLinks}">
    <f:for each="{pageevents}" as="event">
        <f:render partial="Event/EventItem" arguments="{event:event}" />
    </f:for>
</f:widget.paginate>

The list-action itself is registered as cacheable while the filter-form has noCache="1" as argument, because otherwise changes of the filter form by the user won't work becaus of the cache. 


The problem is as follows: 

The loading of the default event list (first page of the pagination and empty filter) itself is pleasantly short. BUT switching to a different page of the event list or changing and submitting the filter form takes incredibly long to load, between 10 seconds and 30 seconds, roundabout. I wondered if all events where fetched from the db BEFORE the pagination widget limits the output, but the widget description says: "However, the blogs are NOT fetched from the database until you actually use them, so the paginate ViewHelper will adjust the query sent to the database and receive only the small subset of objects." Also, the loading time is equally as long if a filter is chosen that returns only, like, 3 results. 

Does anyone know how we can make these actions load faster? What are we doing wrong? 

I would be grateful for any idea. 

Thanks a lot.