Theme Development - Time consuming and slow

[jellyMan]

I'm building a theme using the default as a base.

 

I've got cache turned off because I want to see my updates after refreshing the page but it takes forever. It's really slowing me down and it's getting boring.

 

Does anybody have any tips to speed things up?

[Apium]

What do you mean, it's taking forever? Which part, or do you mean theme development in general?

 

Coding, and in this case specifically front-end development, is a slow thing. There is just a lot that needs to be done and it takes a while. With experience you'll get better at it but there is no magic way to improve your performance.

 

You can, however, improve your both your speed and code quality quite substantially by using a proper work environment, starting with a good IDE.

[jellyMan]

I think you misunderstood my post.

 

Im using sublime text 3 - im compiling my scss using laravel elixir, my coding speed is fine. 

 

What I mean is that when i make some changes, I go to reload my page to check out what my changes to look - and it's taking almost a minute to load the page. This is on a local set up so connection speeds aren't an issue. It's prestashop itself, seems to take a hell of a long time to render pages with cache turned off.

[Apium]

A minute is a long time, even with cache turned off. For my local dev installation, it's generally around 3-4 seconds, so you should be able to improve quite substantially.

 

Are you using any non-required modules? Do you have any non-required htaccess lines?

 

In Chrome (or the equivalent in any other browser) you can find a "Network" tab under the dev tools, what is taking up the most time? The initial connection?

[jellyMan]

Ok, so there's a lot going on here.

 

The default theme seems to have a lot of dependencies. And they get loaded in from all over the place

 

Any tips?

 

All together there's 75 http requests which is a bit ridiculous really.

 

Edited October 14, 2016 by jellyMan (see edit history)

[jellyMan]

The admin area is super slow as well by the way

[Apium]

The initial request takes 22 seconds? (!!)

 

That is insane. What kind of machine are you running this on? Do you have a dedicated core for the local server to use? Are you running any other heavy I/O processes on the same drive? Which software do you use for the local server?

 

Regarding the requests: go to Modules -> Positions in the backend, and look for modules (displayHeader hook is a good start) that are currently hooking into the FO that you do not need, and disable/uninstall those.

Edited October 14, 2016 by Apium (see edit history)

[jellyMan]

I'm running a centos6 vm with apache2 on a windows 10 host machine. Doesn't have a dedicated core. No heavy processes running.

 

Like I said, i was intending on keeping a lot of the functionality that currently gets loaded in through the header hook, think I might have to look at bringing all the assets in through my compiler instead and see if that improves things.