I looked into wordpress speed optimization a little while ago. What I found is that all the PHP and MySQL code creates for a large memory footprint and a lot of setup and teardown for each connection! If you use 10 or 20 concurrent connections to Wordpress on a smaller box, the memory will be exhausted, MySQL will crash, and your visitors will be greeted with an ugly error. Don't get me wrong, I love wordpress, but the open source app wasn't built for scaling.
The best solution I have found is to use caching. There is quite a bit of discussion about different apps for caching static content (nginx, apache caching, varnish, squid, etc.) My preferred solution is varnish-cache. Web caching of semi-static content is all it was developed for, and it does a freakin' awesome job at it. There's a wordpress plugin to clear the cache when you update content on the site. I really would like to develop something to pre-cache WP pages, but I'm a bit of a perfectionist. https://www.varnish-cache.org/ http://wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress-varnish/ http://systemsarchitect.net/boost-wordpress-performance-with-varnish-cache/ (I got WAY better results than this guy... I don't remember the #, but it was awesome!) Wordpress gets more complicated when you add comments into the mix (you need to use the big memory footprint). Varnish doesn't help you here; however, most sites won't get large comment traffic. Varnish can pass this info back to wordpress to handle comments. "disqus" or something similar can be used for high-comment sites. YSLOW plugin for firefox/chrome (or something similar) can show you where other slowdowns on your site are (ie. monolithic images, css dependencies, etc.) I also found wpengine.com. They handle all the caching crap for you and have a sandbox for your wordpress development. Tada! Seriously though, who doesn't want to play with varnish-cache-- at least until you get bored and don't want to worry about it :) http://wpengine.com/ -Jason On Tue, Jan 14, 2014 at 10:51 AM, Daniel <[email protected]> wrote: > I would look into the reason for the slowness. Is the memory fully used? Is > there a rogue process running? What is the root cause? If this is not > identified it could happen somewhere else. > > -Daniel > On Jan 14, 2014 10:05 AM, "Steve Alligood" <[email protected]> wrote: > > > ok, for extreme speed[1] and still have the benefits of Wordpress, you > can > > move the main index page and create a cron every five minutes to wget the > > real wordpress page and save it as a static index page. Comments, posts, > > etc, will take up to five minutes to show up, but an incredible number of > > page views can happen to that static file in the same cpu as a few hits > to > > the php file (aka, tens of thousands per second versus tens per second). > > > > Of course, you may not need that level of performance. > > > > -Steve > > > > [1] 'extreme speed' as in not have a server fall over when slashdot or > > digg lists your page. > > > > > > On Jan 14, 2014, at 9:58 AM, Adam Stevenson wrote: > > > > > Wordpress is pretty slow for a number of reasons, but some easy things > > you > > > can do to speed it up is to install a php op-code cache, and a word > press > > > cache plugin. I would recommend xcache http://xcache.lighttpd.net/for > > the > > > op code cache, and probably WP-Cache for the word press cache plugin. > > > > > > Other suggestions would be to use nginx for the webserver, cache the > sql > > > queries, or move to a faster blogging platform :) > > > > > > Adam > > > > > > > > > > > /* > > PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net > > Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug > > Don't fear the penguin. > > */ > > > > /* > PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net > Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug > Don't fear the penguin. > */ > /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
