Wordpress performance, avoid being ‘wordpressed’
Wordpress is notorious for being slow, and anyone thinking about higher loads on their blog is familiar with the idea of being ‘wordpressed’. Being wordpressed means that your blog has said it can’t go on anymore, and that you should go on without it.
With this in mind I started to look at just how fast my blog is. I have good hosting, but since Wordpress is dynamic it still takes a considerable resources to generate each page. Being a super dork I started looking at the performance issue by first looking at the database. I tweaked some MySQL cache variables and basically came up with no benefit. The site was still only able to load 3 pages per second, or 180 pages per minute.
I started to look at the WP Super Cache plugin, but apparently you need to be running Apache for some annoying reason. My blog is powered by lighttpd, and the idea of going back to Apache made me sad. There is another WP Cache plugin, suspiciously named WP Cache. Even though it wasn’t super I figured I would try it. Amazingly enough this plugin worked swimmingly, and was very easy to install. My blog can now serve about 8 pages per second, or 480 pages per minute.
480 pages per minute is nothing to sneeze at, so I don’t think I’ll bother optimizing this blog any more. (this is the whole page including images if you are curious) After doing this much testing I am a bit curious about how apache would hold up.