That’s show number 3 under the belt for us and a big thank you to Gary Pendergast from Automattic (they’re hiring ).

After watching this episode you’ll have loads of information about how you can improve WordPress performance on your hosting environment of choice. Gary covers everything from simple tips like caching plugins and CDNs that anyone can do right through to complex scaling tips like multi-server and sharding!

Show Notes

Web Servers

• Apache vs Ngnix.

Caching – WP Super Cache & APC

• WP Super Cache.

• Opcode cache – APC – Gary explains the differences between non opcode cache and opcode.

CDN

• Standalone CDNs – MaxCDN, Cloudflare, Edgecast.

• Jetpack – Photon and the Photon API.

MySQL

• MySQL vs MariaDB vs  Percona.

• Storage engines and indexation. What are the differences between MyISAM and InnoDB?

• Should someone write a plugin to set all the tables to InnoDB in WP and put it in the repo or are their risks?

• Why doesn’t core update to create InnoDB?

• Gary’s Pro Tip: innodb_buffer_pool_size. Set this to 40% RAM if your database and web server are on the same server or 80% RAM if DB on own server.  You can set this is my.cnf.

• Gary’s Pro Tip: Set both query_cache_size and query_cache_type to 0.

Multi Server – HyperDB

• Multi Server comes into play when it’s time to stop scaling up (more CPUs and more RAM) and time to start scaling out (Multiple servers and Multiple databases).
• Object Cache – Memcached.
• Batcache – No need for WP Super Cache.
• Varnish – trickier to get up and running than Batcache but offers further performance benefits.

• How do you tackle  setting up multi server from the start?

• Replication:
  • Master -> Slaves
  • Master -> Master
• Sharding.

Bonus Material!

• Gary Pendergasts Lighting Talk on WordPress Performance Tuning from WordCamp Melbourne 2013 and Gary’s slides from that talk.