APC Cache to the Rescue

On the advice of Aaron Collegeman, I installed APC (Alternative PHP Cache) on my server and noticed an immediate performance boost.

Two days later, my MediaTemple DV was crashing — usually when I was in the WordPress admin. Turns out, APC’s default is 32Mb of memory.

Again following Aaron’s advice (and help), we doubled APC’s memory allocation to 64 Mb. APC is now holding steady around 60% of that new amount, and things are humming along.

Memory usage is up slightly for the server now, but CPU and Load are down. (Load spiked some when we increased the memory):

Still more performance work to do, according to Google Webmaster tools.

The Never Ending Performance Battle

Hint: this is not the direction to go in, if you’re working on site performance:

There are many frustrating aspects to dealing with performance. For example:

Google Webmaster tools says one thing.

Google Page Test tool says something else.

And Yahoo, via YSlow, says something else (and more of it).

But my server tends to agree with Google Webmaster tools this week.

Next up:

  • APC set up on the server.
  • New theme, with less image resizing.
  • CDN.
  • Light a candle.
  • Sacrifice a chicken.

Optimizing Site Performance with Gzip Compression

As I continue on my site performance kick, I’ve found an excellent resource for compressing files using Gzip, to speed up a site.

Check out How To Optimize Your Site With GZIP Compression.

Improving site performance

I’ve been focusing a lot of attention on site performance research.

This is one of the best posts I’ve found on the subject:
Improving web performance with Apache and htaccess by Samuel Santos.

Source: samaxes.com