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Wordpress Performance: Why My Site Is So Much Faster Than Yours — Elliott C. Back

Started by elliottback · 8 months ago

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60 comments

  • DrUnKtAnK

    2 years ago

    Great article. Dugg -- Thanks.
    reply
  • max

    2 years ago

    Nice article, this should help me since I have 3 servers now because of load problems but now maybe I can follow some of your PHP hacks!
    reply
  • test

    2 years ago

    test test test test
    reply
  • Jason

    2 years ago

    Thanks for the link to my article. Here comes the hordes, hope it stays up!
    reply
  • celsius°

    2 years ago

    dugg!
    reply
  • Jeremy Steele

    2 years ago

    Hooray! A front-page "how to survive digg" article that actually loads!
    reply
  • Jeremy

    2 years ago

    Nice article.. Gives me something to think about for future WP installations.
    reply
  • Dave

    2 years ago

    I wrote a plug-in a while back that provides some additional insurance against a digging/slashdotting, etc. It allows you to automatically utilize the Coral Content Distribution Network for readers that come from specified domains.

    http://theblogthatnoonereads.tunasoft.com/coral...
    reply
  • Mark DeCarlo

    2 years ago

    Wordpress plagued me too for a while.

    After that, I just quit.

    I go to Tech CX alot now.

    http://www.techcx.blogspot.com
    reply
  • BIll Larson

    2 years ago

    I had some problems with WP-Cache as it was not showing the comment form on articles for registered users, if the page cache was triggered by a un-registered one. So you might wanna be aware of that....
    reply
  • Majic

    2 years ago

    Good post! I always find it amazing the people's solution to any problem is more. Looking at what your doing, and making sure you're getting the most from any system is vital
    reply
  • Ken Savage

    2 years ago

    Great article Elliott.
    reply
  • Lee

    2 years ago

    yeah I left wordpress a while ago :( Cool article though!
    reply
  • Arne de Boer

    2 years ago

    I rely on gninx:

    advertisement:
    Capitalists: we will make tofu from your balls:



    http://www.google.com/alerts



    Search terms: Bush took suicide pill


    Type: News


    How often: as-it-happens


    Your e-mail:


    Create alert

    *************************Be the FIRST to know!*************************
    reply
  • Arne de Boer

    2 years ago

    nginx that is.
    btw, Bush took red suicide pill ;-)))
    reply
  • Bork

    2 years ago

    I just wanted to see if the comments were live and not just permanentally cached.
    reply
  • Ken Savage

    2 years ago

    cached! :P
    reply
  • Elliott Back

    2 years ago

    No, they're live really! ;)
    reply
  • hl

    2 years ago

    ah, how painful it must be to have so many hits! =P
    reply
  • subcorpus

    2 years ago

    so i guess i shudnt think about migrating to movabletype ...
    but i've heard so much about mavabletype being the holy grail of blogging software ...
    guess i've heard wrong ... hehe ...
    reply
  • Planet Malaysia

    2 years ago

    Let's see how's is your wordpress performance(almost 1000 digg). Good to share :P
    reply
  • Keith

    2 years ago

    I tend to like WP-Cache until it decides to give me some problems. Now, I decided to do without it.
    reply
  • Subject at Hand

    2 years ago

    Thanks for the great post. I'm going to implement most of your suggestions as soon as I can.
    reply
  • Arne de Boer

    2 years ago

    Welcome to the DIGITAL age, mr. bussh.

    I've got + worker_connections 10240
    ;-))), and I need them!
    serving more than 7 million hits a day
    reply
  • Mark Krynsky

    2 years ago

    Great info Elliott. A few days late for me since I use Wordpress for my site and felt the pain when I made the digg front page on Sunday for the first time. I went down for a little but with the help of my host was able to debug a bad plugin and quickly installed WP-Cache and was back up running fine after that. I can appreciate the fact that you are very lean on plugins. You also offer some great tuning and load balancing tips here. I'm sure other fellow Wordpress users appreciate this.
    reply
  • Rishi

    2 years ago

    Thanks a lot for the useful hacks . I was trying to avoid digg because I didn't want to over run my shared server but with this help I shouldn't have to worry about digg crashing anymore.
    reply
  • Hitsugaya Toshirou

    2 years ago

    Thanks Mark! I really needed http://techcx.blospot.com!
    Keep on blogging!
    reply
  • Hitsugaya Toshirou

    2 years ago

    Whoops, mis spelled the blog site!
    http://techcx.blogspot.com
    reply
  • Tim

    2 years ago

    This is great. We're not quite there yet with tektag.com, but I'm bookmarking this for when the day comes.

    Thanks,

    Tim
    reply
  • 11amDesign

    2 years ago

    Bookmarked ...
    reply
  • Motorcycle Guy

    2 years ago

    Is there anyway to implement memcached with wordpress?
    reply
  • Elliott Back

    2 years ago

    YES! But memcached is pretty hardcore ;) Take a look at this article or the svn package.
    reply
  • trung

    2 years ago

    Thank you sir. I will optimize my wordpress now.
    reply
  • Ted

    2 years ago

    This page was slow to load for me.
    reply
  • Elliott Back

    2 years ago

    Yes, but you're from Guam. That might be the first problem. 24/7 monitoring in place shows that this page is loaded in entirety on an average of about 1.5 seconds. Then the images all come in, which takes more time.
    reply
  • grandMasterkrust

    2 years ago

    Another blog i run has been having severe load issues, and its something i have struggled to understand - i set up the cache and it caches pages but how does it deal with new comments ? Does it recreate the cached pages each time a new comment is posted? I ask becasue i have threads that can generate close to 600 comments in about 5 hours on a particular article _ does any one know where i can find this kind of information ?

    Or is the article cached and the comments dynamic or do i need to re do my theme to fit this kind of functionality in
    reply
  • sufehmi

    2 years ago

    @GrandMaster -- the easiest way which will decrease your server's load most (I assume you;re running Wordpress / similar cms) is to install an edge server / reverse proxy solution.

    An easy to follow tutorial regarding this can be read here.

    It constantly amazes me how people keep on prescribing the hardest way with minimum return to be done first.
    Squid (and other edge server solution) are easy to implement, takes only minutes, and easily drop a double digit server load to a single digit.

    Yes, you may not be able to do this on a shared webhosting environment; but so does many of the tips mentioned in this article.

    Hope it helps.
    reply
  • Sakimichi

    2 years ago

    Thanks for the tutorial :D
    reply
  • dada

    1 year ago

    Nice Site!
    reply
  • artofnet

    1 year ago

    Hi,

    Thanks for writing this article, because I have the same performance trouble and now I have installed wp-cache plugin. Glad find your articles from google...

    Cheers...
    reply
  • georgedonnelly

    1 year ago

    That's:

    // Enable the WordPress Object Cache:
    define('ENABLE_CACHE', true);


    It needs quotes around ENABLE_CACHE.
    reply
  • CDN Net

    1 year ago

    Nice ideas and tips. You didn't mention moving to CDN service all static content. It provides extra performance (lowers your server load), thus you can serve more web visitors with easy.
    reply
  • Ian

    1 year ago

    Another big gain is to switch from Apache/mod_php to nginx+fastcgi.

    It's smaller, and more free RAM means a couple extra php processes, should you so desire, plus the inherent speed boost you get from using nginx.

    In a (wholly unscientific and useless) benchmark, using nginx with 3 php fastcgi processes, eaccelerator, wp-cache, a properly tuned mysql, etc.

    /usr/sbin/ab -n 10000 -c 64 http://host.name/

    ... gives back ~1500 requests a second at around 525mbit/s total transfer... which puts the limiting factor squarely on my network card.
    reply
  • Lu

    1 year ago

    Nice graphics / pictures!

    Which software did you use?

    Greetings,

    Lu
    reply
  • Lurid Cinema

    1 year ago

    This give me a lot of stuff to go over. My site is fine most of the time & some times VERY slow. I am on shared hosting and my site is getting only a few hundred hits a day. I am ready to migrate to my own server.....GRRR headaches.
    reply
  • TrWord

    1 year ago

    Thanks.
    reply
  • Blagovest

    1 year ago

    Check out the recently launched WP-Offload plugin. You will see a dramatical speedup especially if your posts have a lot of static content (images, documents, movies, etc.). It will completely redirect all the requests for static content to external cache servers, so the load on your web server will decrease significantly.
    reply
  • Mirc

    1 year ago

    Thank you
    reply
  • Mike

    1 year ago

    Hi, Do you still recommend Cari.net ? I've heard of several people having problems with them. I am about to switch from my previous hosting company Eapps. BTW I recommend Eapps, but I am switching because I need a dedicated server and Cari.net prices are far more cheap than Eapps... almost 90 times more cheap for what I need.

    So, if you were about to switch from another hosting company, would you switch to cari.net?

    thanks!
    reply
  • lulz

    1 year ago

    Hi elliot can you otimize my server for me please? i'll pay of course, please contact me via the email i provided here thanks.
    reply
  • Make it faster | www.redips.ne

    10 months ago

    To turn off all needless apache modules, you will have to go to the /etc/httpd/conf.d/ directory also and rename module files like: squid.conf to squid.off or ssl.conf to ssl.off This way, httpd will not include this modules during startup.
    reply
  • knowledge database

    10 months ago

    Nice! Will try this out :)
    reply
  • Willem Kossen

    9 months ago

    Hi there,

    I found this rather late, but it saved my page. I struggled getting my wp log working on my rather slow firewall-server-mail-web-thingy. I applied almost all your tweaks and it speaded up my site tremendously. In fact, it stopped my httpd from crashing every time i loaded more than one admin page at the same time. http://wkossen.nl/weblog/ still won't live through a digg frontpage episode though... (it's a alix amd geode 256MB embedded little box with centos 5, so slow by nature..)
    In fact, the most effective change was from eAccellerator php plugin. that made THE difference....

    Cheers!

    Willem Kossen
    reply
  • nullrend

    9 months ago

    I've been reading your blog for a while now, and just now made the connection of yours to cari.net. They're my current employer, *cof cof*
    reply
  • fak3r

    7 months ago

    nice article, besides the db caching you list, I've found great success using Xcache with PHP5, running on the nginx webserver and multiple fastcgi processes on Debian. I don't get that much traffic, so right now I'm still hosted on a home dsl line - but I have a number of sites all chewing off the same stack.

    I used to run varnish as a reverse proxy, but with nginx and it's ability to auto cache images, I've dropped it for now, but I recommend you checkout varnish if you have a busier site.

    Oh, and one more thing, I've started to use Flickr as my CDN for images, I only have a couple on there, but I know the more I offload, the less will have to squeeze out via my 2 copper wires! ;)
    reply
  • Jeff from MegaBurst

    7 months ago

    Nice info. As always I suggest testing the performance and benchmarking when all is set-up.
    reply
  • Parcel

    5 months ago

    Sorry, but you have 22 external Javascript files and 16 CSS background images. Try to use css sprites, css cacheer and maybe phpspeedy to reduce your HTTP requests. You got an F Grade from ySlow. Hmmmm....
    reply
  • Jojo

    5 months ago

    Very cool tricks! Thanks for sharing.
    reply
  • quellish

    5 months ago

    How strange that you advocate load balancing. Word press does not work properly behind a load balancer, even the WP guys own up to this. wordpress.com uses a different codebase.
    reply
  • taxact

    4 months ago

    Nice. Implemented a few things.. seems to work. Thanks for the article
    reply

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