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Looking At Performance

Optimization and performance tuning is something that has sparked my attention and consumed lots of my spare time in the past couple of months.    All and all, it really has been worth it.

Late last year, it became clear to me that administration and upgrading was really becoming a real pain for me.   Just my family has over 20 blogs I administer and all ran their own installs of WP.   This required a couple of cheap hosting solutions and loads of time to keep each of these installs up to date with upgrades to the core and plugins.    It was just too time consuming.

In early Janauary, I released an install of WPMU to help ease this pain.    This allowed all blogs to be in the same installation with upgrading and plugins now much easier for me.    The problem with WPMU is that it is resource intensive.   It wasn’t something for the cheaper hosts and required a drastic change.

While my hosting solution now has enough resources and power to far exceed my requirements, it has led me to try and make both the server and my software as optimized as possible.   Here are some of things that I have found helped me out thus far:

1. The first solution I came across was the addition of wp-super-cache to help ease the load on the database server.   This plugin makes use of caching to server static HTML files of my most popular sites.   It has already decreased the server load substantially.
2. Optimization of Apache and mySQL were next on the agenda.    Media Temple has several resources that helped me with this and it was also coupled with some articles I found on the internet for securing and optimizing servers.    Simple things that help with servers.
3. Optimized and removed some the inefficient plugins that I was running.   Believe it or not, there are many plugins that are not efficient at all and can run “way too many” queries on the database.    Simple as turning on the wordpress benchmark that is commented out in most themes
4. One of the smartest things that I did as well is join WPMUDEV Premium.   Andrew and James are very wise and have several plugins for their members that make life easier.   The other members have also helped me out huge including input from Luke and Andrea R.   I appreciate it
5. After several discussions about database structure when it comes to WPMU, I have concluded having only one database will hinder my server resources and eventually will limit my expansion.     Since I have my own server, I implemented a multiple database solution that chooses the database from the hash of the blog.   It is pretty slick.   I started with 16 databases and decided it wasn’t going to be too hard to go with 256.   That is where I am now.   In theory, it is better to query a small database versus one large one.   Database caching is getting better, but really it won’t hurt me to go this way.
6. Trying to stop spammers is an easy way to slow down resource stealing.   I have quite a few plugins now to try and stop spammers before they use resources.    I also have many rules in my .htaccess file.   It seems to be helping.

There are some other things that I have done I am sure, but these are the ones that stick out in my mind while writing this.   It is a constant learning curve and I am open to ideas from others as well