< Neo22s />

In the first part we explained some tricks to make your WordPress faster, but sometimes this is not even enough….we need more speed!

Before I explain more tricks I will like to make a note; I don’t recommend you to change anything from the core of WP. We could make WP much faster by just tweaking a bit the core…but I don’t recommend to you if later you need to upgrade you WP you will lose all that changes!

Then I’m going to focus in tweaking the Theme and usage of some plugins.

• Use less plugins, and remove the tables they are created and no longer are needed
• Get rid off the widget bar and make it static! This will reduce lot of calls to the DB.
• Try to make it everything as static as possible ;)
• Use a CDN, less stress for your server, since will receive less requests. You can use Coral CDN (a bit slow) or Amazon for example.
• Try to use only one CSS and one JS, with w3 total cache this is kind of easy to do.
• Be careful with missing files, if the file doesn’t exist a 404 page returns and needs to be executed :S you can check this here tools.pingdom.com (great tool)
• Erase the comments and use Disqus (export them first, you can use the plugin), this is extremely tweaking, but can be a last solution, I’m not at this point yet but….maybe.
• W3 Total Cache is probably the best cache plugin now a days, give it a try!

And I think that’s all….

Is not bullshit I swear! Absolutely possible, but you need to be using a VPS or a dedicated server to do this.

This is really handy if you are not using a cache system such as APC or xcache, and you store your cached files in folders.

For this we will use TMPFS

Tmpfs is like a ramdisk, but different. Like a ramdisk, tmpfs can use your RAM, but it can also use your swap devices for storage. And while a traditional ramdisk is a block device and requires a mkfs command of some kind before you can actually use it, tmpfs is a filesystem, not a block device; you just mount it, and it’s there. All in all, this makes tmpfs the niftiest RAM-based filesystem I’ve had the opportunity to meet.

Example to use it in your WordPress:
(check the right paths)

Edit /etc/fstab/ and we add the file system

tmpfs /home/neo22s/wp-content/cache tmpfs defaults,size=2g,noexec,nosuid,uid=648,gid=648,mode=1755 0 0

Add a new line at /etc/rc.local in order to execute it on system start up:

ionice -c3 -n7 nice -n 19 rsync -ahv --stats --delete /_b/tmpfs/cache/ /home/neo22s/wp-content/cache/ 1>/dev/null

New crontab job (using crontab-e), to execute

*/5 * * * * /usr/bin/ionice -c3 -n7 /bin/nice -n 19 /usr/bin/rsync -ah --stats --delete /home/neo22s/wp-content/cache/ /_b/tmpfs/cache/ 1>/dev/null

Done!

Currently I’m not using this method since I have xcache that make my life easier working with w3 total cache plugin, great solution.

Of course you can use TMPFS for many other things, check askapache, where you can find loads of info and examples a great work.

For busy websites, using a CDN (Content Delivery Network) to transfer static content such as images, javascripts, stylesheets, Flash etc. is highly recommended (as listed in Yahoo!’s Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site) as it reduces server load and bandwidth thus improves stability and availability.

There’s plenty os commercial CDN’s like Akamai, Limelight, FileCloud, Amazon S3… and as far as I know just an exception, the free P2P-based CoralCDN allows us to take full advantage of a powereful CDN without spending a dime.

How to use it? Well, basically, just append .nyud.net to the hostname of any URL, and that URL will be handled by Coral – simple.

Examples:

http://neo22s.com.nyud.net

http://neo22s.com.nyud.net/wp-content/themes/neo-fluid-blue/style.css

http://www.coralcdn.org.nyud.net/imgs/logo.jpg

The service works really good as far as I could try, but it’s slow, nothing to compare to Amazon S3 and can help us to prevent hotlinking other sites.

Also we can find a WordPress plugin Free CDN that makes things easier in WP.

Remember another interesting service to cache your images rir.li.

I’ve been using WordPress for over 4 years now.  I also have developed some plugins like Twitter Badge, WP-RIR, WP-PageScroll and I wrote few more thinks about it.

We can say that I’m not the average user but neither I’m a PRO developer for WP. The point is that as user I Love WordPress but from other side as technician sometimes I HATE IT.

I had a few discussions with people about the good and the bad things of WP, of course at the end for me it’s positive, but it bothers me that there’s few known issues that they should take care of and they don’t.

Anyway here’s my list with a short description.

The Love

• Easy, yep WP it’s easy and everybody knows how to use it. Great work on it.
• Community, there’s a huge community of developers and designers that releases their work for free making this software good.
• GPL, free software license, what else do you want?
• Custom, it’s pretty easy for any normal user to install plugins, themes…even change them.
• Upgrades and updates, they are automatically making your life easier, same as 1st point.
• WordCamps, this is a great idea I may say and I love it!

The Hate

• Slow, it maybe fast to you, but for me it’s a really heavy application to be a blog software. Without plugins to cache content you can’t run an instance of WP in a shared hosting….
• Data Base, this is terrible, still uses MySam, now many people will say this is an advantage, come on we are in 2010! relational data bases it’s a must have, and what about normalization?
• Download size, now a days this is no trouble, but how can be over 2MB size?
• Bugs, there’s so many WP installations that some people is trying really hard to hack this software and for instance finding bugs. Thankfully we have a great community that seems to work 24/7.
• Plugins, I love the plugins and the work from the community, but you need to be aware what you install in your WP, I know it’s not the fault of WP, but some how as they do with the themes being picky, should be with plugins testing them even just a little bit.

As conclusion I will say that they should focus to improve performance instead of adding features and more and more features….And as I said before WP it’s my favorite blogging and even CMS tool.

Last words: Thanks to the WP team and the community for the work they have done, this is just a constructive opinion meaning the best intentions.

Image from sitepoint.

First of all, Merry Xmas!!!

Do you remember rir.li this service to prevent you to do image hotlinking?

To make easier the usage of this service, here you have the plugin for WordPress.

Installation:

• Download
• In your WordPress go to admin Dashboard -> Plugins -> Add new->Upload
• Select the downloaded file
• Activate
• Enjoy ;)

Usage:
Once it’s installed, you can use it to copy any images in the service of rir.li like this:

<rir>http://www.turisbot.com/images/maastricht.jpg</rir>

or

[rir]http://www.turisbot.com/images/maastricht.jpg[/rir]