Wordpress is a popular platform for blogs and I have found there are some “simple” optimizations that have made a huge difference in speed. Although this was written for Wordpress, it boosts the speed of all PHP driven web applications, such as Moodle, although the performance enhancement on Moodle was not as brisk.

While there are many ways to optimize Apache and Mysql, this how-to focuses primarily on optimization of PHP (I will leave Apache/Lighttpd and Mysql performance to my readers for now).

For the impatient : Here are the results

Performance testing

Benchmarking was performed over the LAN using ab on paultag’s blog (running in an OpenVZ container). Thank you to paultag for allowing me access to his VPS.

Hardware:

CPU: Intel(R) Xeon(TM) CPU 3.00GHz
Web server: Apache 2.2.11 or Lighttpd 1.4.19
Wordpress : 2.7.1

Baseline Wordpress performance

This was the baseline performance of Wordpress out of the box (these numbers speak for themselves). If you performance test your Wordpress install your numbers will likely be very similar.

ab -n 100 -c 10 http://blog.paultags.com/
This is ApacheBench, Version 2.3 >$Revision: 655654 $<
Copyright 1996 Adam Twiss, Zeus Technology Ltd, http://www.zeustech.net/
Licensed to The Apache Software Foundation, http://www.apache.org/

Benchmarking blog.paultags.com (be patient).....done

Server Software: Apache/2.2.11
Server Hostname: blog.paultags.com
Server Port: 80

Document Path: /
Document Length: 9547 bytes

Concurrency Level: 10
Time taken for tests: 7.568 seconds
Complete requests: 100
Failed requests: 0
Write errors: 0
Total transferred: 271800 bytes
HTML transferred: 224800 bytes
Requests per second: 13.21 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 756.794 [ms] (mean)
Time per request: 75.679 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate: 35.07 [Kbytes/sec] received

Connection Times (ms)
min mean[+/-sd] median max
Connect: 0 0 0.2 0 1
Processing: 241 495 545.3 360 3635
Waiting: 241 495 545.3 360 3634
Total: 241 496 545.3 360 3635

Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
50% 360
66% 413
75% 452
80% 517
90% 653
95% 945
98% 3429
99% 3635
100% 3635

Optimization

1. Optimize Mysql. While there are many ways to optimize Apache, Lighttpd, and Mysql, there is one small tweak to Mysql worth mentioning.

Using any editor, open /etc/mysql/my.cnf and disable InnoDB. This is an easy edit, simply remove the # from the line :

#skip-innodb

skip-innodb

This significantly reduces the ram used by Mysql (read the comments in the config file, just above the line we edited).

2. Optimize PHP with a “PHP Accelerator” . Here I use APC as I found it performs a bit better then xcache or eAccelerator (unpublished data).

Alternative PHP Cache (APC) is a free, open source framework that optimizes PHP intermediate code and caches data and compiled code from the PHP bytecode compiler in shared memory.

sudo apt-get install php-apc

3. Increase the PHP memory limit. Open your php.ini

Apache : /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini
Lighttpd: /etc/php5/cgi/php.ini

change

memory_limit = 16M

to (you may go to 128 M if you wish)

memory_limit = 64M

4. Install memcache

memcached is a high-performance, distributed memory object caching system, generic in nature, but intended for use in speeding up dynamic web applications by alleviating database load.

sudo apt-get install php5-memcache memcached

5. Install Wordpress Cache (WP-Supercache is more complex and did not perform any better). This last step does not add as much as the PHP Acceleration or memcache.

WP Cache

After installation, activate the plugin and make sure it is enabled in your wordpress admin panel.

6. Restart your web server :

Apache :

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Lighttpd :

sudo /etc/init.d/lighttpd restart

With these configuration changes you will use less ram (due the the mMsql edit). APC and memcache use approximately 25 Mb of ram.

Results

OMG THAT’S HUGE


ab -n 100 -c 10 http://blog.paultags.com/
This is ApacheBench, Version 2.3 >$Revision: 655654 $<
Copyright 1996 Adam Twiss, Zeus Technology Ltd, http://www.zeustech.net/
Licensed to The Apache Software Foundation, http://www.apache.org/

Benchmarking blog.paultags.com (be patient).....done

Server Software: Apache/2.2.11
Server Hostname: blog.paultags.com
Server Port: 80

Document Path: /
Document Length: 9547 bytes

Concurrency Level: 10
Time taken for tests: 0.051 seconds
Complete requests: 100
Failed requests: 0
Write errors: 0
Total transferred: 998949 bytes
HTML transferred: 962892 bytes
Requests per second: 1942.31 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 5.149 [ms] (mean)
Time per request: 0.515 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate: 18947.97 [Kbytes/sec] received

Connection Times (ms)
min mean[+/-sd] median max
Connect: 0 0 0.2 0 1
Processing: 3 4 0.7 4 7
Waiting: 2 4 0.6 4 6
Total: 4 5 0.7 5 8

Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
50% 5
66% 5
75% 5
80% 5
90% 6
95% 6
98% 8
99% 8