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Site and server optimization

By ovi on 19.01.2009

I have spent the last 2 month, try­ing to sort out a prob­lem I had with my server being brought down to its knees if my own site (the site you are read­ing right now) got 2 – 5 vis­i­tors at the same time. I have been read­ing all opti­miza­tion reports, how-​tos and tips I could find on the net.

I have fid­dled with MYSQL, apache2 and this site in par­tic­u­lar to no avail. I am pretty sure the prob­lem lies with word­press and some plu­g­ins, not with the server. While doing some more research on the net I found this guy’s web­site: www​.page​load​time​.com and the funny thing is he promises to do exactly what I am look­ing for right now and is also liv­ing in South Africa.

After being put off by the text on the top right side of his web­site I decided to review his ser­vices and con­tact him:


This web­page loads in 1 sec­ond
All the Word­Press 2.6 pages on this web­site loads within one second.

It does not use prox­ies, no Lighttpd, no Nginx, no mod_​cgi.

Just nor­mal Apache, PHP, MySql and the WP Super Cache.

Let me make your web­site fast as well, so that you can have the time and plea­sure of adding more con­tent to your website.

I do not agree with these state­ments or rather some of them are irrelevant:

This text states that this web­site loads in 1 sec­ond which might be true, but I think what is meant is that this web­site is gen­er­ated in 1 sec­ond. The load time depends on the client’s con­nec­tion. The next point I dis­agree with is the site using WP Super Cache and still hav­ing a 1 sec­ond gen­er­a­tion time — I think 1 sec­ond gen­er­a­tion time is a pretty bad result for a cached site.

Are you curi­ous what all these times mean? Take the page you are cur­rently read­ing as an example:

Ren­der Time: 0.200 cpu sec (59% load, 18.065 startup). Clock: 0.335 sec (35.2% for queries). DB queries: 27, none defec­tive, none > 0.500 sec. Mem­ory: 11.9MB

Now what does this mean? It means this page was gen­er­ated in 0.335 sec­onds using 27 queries mean­ing that my server could gen­er­ate this page 3 times per sec­ond, 180 times per minute if it was only serv­ing this web­site. So if this site was alone on the server it could be served to 180 vis­i­tors per minute. How long it took to be deliv­ered to you depends on your Inter­net con­nec­tion :-) But what if you have i.e. 3 sites with sim­i­lar val­ues on your server? That means each of your sites can only be served to 60 vis­i­tors per minute. You have to take all this info into account when opti­miz­ing and the most impor­tant tip of all is that you need to have a goal, i.e. state clearly what you want to achieve before start­ing, i.e. have your page gen­er­a­tion time below 0.3 sec­onds or some­thing sim­i­lar. Only if you do this you can actu­ally mea­sure the results of your optimizations.

Free Ser­vices:

  • Add an expires header for css, js and pictures
  • Remove ETags headers
  • Com­press css,html and js

All the free ser­vices offered are basi­cally the advice any decent server admin will give you. Besides that, this advice can be also obtained from the free add-​on for Fire­fox called YSlow but all in all I think it is very nice to offer these ser­vices for free even if it takes just a cou­ple of min­utes to imple­ment they will still greatly improve results.

Donations-​Based:

  • Donations-​supported MySQL Checkup and Tuning

The ser­vice offered here is based upon your MYSQL run-​time vari­ables and uses MySQL­re­port to offer advice for improve­ment. This seems to be good value and is also just a mat­ter of check­ing some vari­ables and inter­pret­ing them, so if the needed dona­tion is not to big, you can con­sider using this ser­vice but you need to be aware that you could also down­load this tool your­self and analyse your MYSQL set­tings. I do also rec­om­mend using php­myad­min, which is usu­ally installed on every server, to nav­i­gate to the Sta­tus tab where you can see the run-​time vari­ables and advice marked in red. Addi­tion­ally you could use the excel­lent MySQL­Tuner which also offers great insight into your MYSQL installation.

Com­mer­cial Services:

  • Install a PHP opcode Cache like Eac­cel­er­a­tor, xCache or APC.
  • Install the sta­tic HTML page cache for Word­Press, Dru­pal or Joomla
  • Install Apache, MySQL and PHP at your webhost

opcode Caches are a great improve­ment to any dynamic site and if you haven’t got one installed you should go ahead and get one now. I per­son­ally use eAc­cel­er­a­tor and am very happy with it as it was extremely easy to install and deliv­ers great improve­ments to my sites.

Installing a sta­tic page cache is a great idea but should only be done after opti­miz­ing your site and should be con­sid­ered a last step. As I haven’t got much expe­ri­ence with Dru­pal or Koomla I can only state that its extremely easy to install a caching plu­gin for word­press but if you are in doubt, go ahead and con­sult this site.

I won’t com­ment on the last ser­vice as it is needed before run­ning a web­server but hon­estly, if you can’t install Apache and MYSQL you have no busi­ness run­ning a web server.

Con­cern­ing the opti­miza­tion for my site, I was suc­cess­ful. I deac­ti­vated a plu­gin that was meant to speed up my site and page gen­er­a­tion times dropped from 0.9 sec­onds to about 0.2 sec­onds. I will not name the plu­gin here because it was not really the plugin’s fault. The plu­gin author had stated a big red warn­ing on the plugin’s site with some sce­nar­ios where the plu­gin could actu­ally slow down a word­press instal­la­tion and the fault is exclu­sively mine for not prop­erly read­ing the warning.

!!!I for­got the most impor­tant tool with which I mea­sured all these times: WP Tuner — its a free plu­gin for word­press and I highly rec­om­mend it. Besides that, I also rec­om­mend this great word­press plu­gin: php speedy. For help tun­ing your server, site or word­press instal­la­tion, feel free to com­ment here or even in the shout­box on the right.

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4 responses to “Site and server optimization”

  1. San Nayak
    San Nayak
    22.01.2009 at 19:16 | | Reply

    I don’t know if you visit to matt cutts blog or not but once he sited this arti­cle to improve server tim­ing on load­ing a page. It is not writ­ten by him but the author did a good job. http://​sixre​vi​sions​.com/​w​e​b​-​d​e​v​e​l​o​p​m​e​n​t​/​1​0​-​w​a​y​s​-​t​o​-​i​m​p​r​o​v​e​-​y​o​u​r​-​w​e​b​-​p​a​g​e​-​p​e​r​f​o​r​m​a​n​ce/

    1. ovi
      ovi
      23.02.2009 at 19:52 | | Reply

      Thx for that link, very inter­est­ing to read indeed.

  2. steve
    steve
    02.11.2009 at 21:27 | | Reply

    Just check­ing out your columns — looks good — though you have some stray code showing:

    [col­umn width=“47%” padding=“0”] and [/​column] in Firefox

    1. ovi
      ovi
      02.11.2009 at 23:05 | | Reply

      Thanks Steve, the col­umn plu­gin has a lit­tle bug: you need to put a space in between its own short codes, oth­er­wise they show up, just like you notices. Fixed it right now :-)

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