Making WordPress Fly

EAST BAY WORDPRESS MEETUP

HOW TO MAKE WP FLY...
LIKE A BAT OUT OF HELL

Sunday, October 6, 13

EXPLAINING
THE SECRETS
BEHIND MANAGED
HOSTING AND REALLY
FAST WORDPRESS SITES

THE ALTERNATIVE TITLE
I could have renamed this presentation

Stefan Didak
http://www.stefandidak.com
(“not a web developer”)

The sound a WordPress site
should make when your client is
happy to pay you more because
their site is so fast that it puts
their competition to shame.

TIME = MONEY

Caching provided by optimizing your site
Caching through plugins
Caching because of all of the above
As you’ve already been shown today

LEVELS OF CACHING
all of those make a difference but... NOT ENOUGH

Don’t just optimize your site
Optimize YOUR SERVER!
and if you have none, build one!
Optimize YOUR CODE TOO!

LEVELS OF CACHING
Everything I’m going to show today requires you to have full
control and access to your server (VM, VPS, Cloud, etc.)

WordPress Caching
Digital Ocean + DEMO
OpCode Caching
Apache v.s. Nginx
Varnish
Memcached
WHAT I’LL BE COVERING
Also known as the Tip of the Iceberg

WP CACHING OVERVIEW
Everyone should know what levels of caching WP supports

Only lasts the duration of the request.
After the request the run-time cache no
longer exists.
For example: the global $post and
$wp_query variables

WORDPRESS CACHING
Run-Time Cache

WordPress has a “Transient Cache” API
that allows you to store data in
your MySQL DB.
Ahum... Right...
But it can still be useful...
if used selectively

WORDPRESS CACHING
Transient Cache

Is usually persistent because it’s stored
“somewhere”.
Somewhere could be in memory through
APC, Memcached, or Redis, but could also
be in your MySQL DB or on disk.

WORDPRESS CACHING
Object Cache

Stores HTML data representing entire
pages. This is one of the more typical
caching schemes used by most plugins.
Unfortunately, not so useful when you have
highly dynamic pages where someone does
not always get the same content (i.e.
membership sites).

WORDPRESS CACHING
Page Cache - Stored on disk or in memory

I don’t like the term and it is no different
from the Object Cache. Instead of storing
entire HTML pages it stores parts of pages.
I like to think of it as just another object
because that’s what it is.

WORDPRESS CACHING
Fragment Cache

I prefer to have full control
over my own online servers
because I can have them be
faster than managed hosting
at a fraction of the cost.

PERSONAL EXPERIENCE
Managed Hosting, however optimized, is still designed to be a
version of a “one size ﬁts all” approach

GREAT(ER) PERFORMANCE
& OK PRICES
GREAT PERFORMANCE
& COOL PRICES

SLOW & EXPENSIVE


NICE PERFORMANCE
& CAN GET EXPENSIVE

After running and testing my ﬁrst
“droplet” on Digital Ocean and after
playing with some deployments on
Linode I knew my shared hosting for
30+ domains would come to an end.
A very WELCOME END!

FIRST DEPLOYMENT
It was really exciting to see my ﬁrst droplet come online

If you don’t care much
about the “managed” part
of managed hosting and
really want things to roar
like a bat out of hell...

HOSTING, BUT WHERE
The long search has come to an end

Once my “stealth project” goes live I
expect that within 2 years I will need
around 150 to 500 virtual servers.
(virtual servers of various capacities)
Digital Ocean has the absolute best
price point I’ve seen. And I’ve been
looking. Really looking.

STEALTH PROJECT
Not to mention, Digital Ocean has a nice evolving API to
manage all your “droplets”. Not as mature as Linode, though!

$20/mo shared hosting
v.s.
$5/mo Digital Ocean Droplet
Oakley Chamber of Commerce
WordPress site
(a heavy and NOT OPTIMIZED one!)

DEMO TIME ! DEMO TIME !
If this doesn’t convince you I don’t know what will

http://oakleychamber.com
http://oc.ignyter.com

TRY IT FOR YOURSELF
anyone with laptops here are encouraged to check it out

WAS THAT FAST
OR WAS THAT FAST?
Or is it just cool to know
that you can do it TOO!?

YES YOU CAN
Stop whining about the commandline and typing on the
keyboard, as if you don’t do that crap when you’re CSS’ing!!!

I can’t show you managed
hosting vs. Digital Ocean at
a $25-30/month vs. $5-10/
month price point...

BUT....

I will take any bet, for any amount of
serious money, that I can setup and
conﬁgure servers on Digital Ocean or
Linode that beat the living daylights
out of any managed hosting in terms
of performance.
And YOU can do it TOO!
So let’s not even talk about
shared hosting anymore, ok?

I know what I’m doing and...
may be biased.
I do, however, believe, that if you put
in some time to learn more than what
you copy & paste will serve you to be
even more valuable to your clients!

COPY AND PASTE
If you can’t do copy and paste then I’m wasting your time and I
am very sorry. If you can, however... new doors will open!

https://www.digitalocean.com/community
https://library.linode.com/
TUTORIALS, GUIDES, AND MORE

INSTALLING AND RUNNING
On how to install, conﬁgure, and run with all the things I
mentioned today, visit the libraries.

OPCODE CACHING
And now to explain what you’ve just seen

What your server does for EVERY page hit
on your site:
Read most (or all) of your PHP ﬁles/code
Interpret each line & “compile” it into what
the CPU understands
Execute the “compiled” code and render out the
page by sending it to the browser.

OPCODE CACHING
Yeah, uh, sure, what what does it DO?!

WITHOUT OPCODE CACHING
PHP

PARSE

PHP

APC
CACHE

COMPILE

EXECUTE

SEND

EXECUTE

SEND

WITH OPCODE CACHING

OPCODE CACHING
The simple explanation

APC
XCache
eAccelerator
Zend OpCache
NuSphere PHPExpress
IonCube Accelerator

OPCODE CACHING
Speeds up your site much more than “regular” ﬁle/data caching

Because APC is going to
be included in “PHP6”
But as we all know, there is no such thing as PHP6, right?
There is a book on PHP6.
But there is no Beta of PHP6.
There isn’t even an Alpha of PHP6.

BUT PHP 5.5 HAS OPCACHE
Performance between APC, XCache, etc. is all very similar

PHP APC
APC = Alternative PHP Cache

Without APC

With “vanilla” APC

Req. Per Sec : 85
Time Per Req. : 900ms
Conc. Time Per Req. : 20ms
Xfer Rate : 898 Kbytes/s

Req. Per Sec : 138.5
Conc. Time Per Req. : 9.5ms

Great, but...
IS THAT ALL?

BENCHMARKING APC
Your site without APC sucks donkey balls

Without APC

With “vanilla” APC

Req. Per Sec : 85
Conc. Time Per Req. : 20ms


Now with apc.stat=off
Time Per Req. : 152.1ms

BENCHMARKING APC
Your site with APC and apc.stat = off WILL FLY!

Only turn APC.STAT to OFF if:
Your PHP code on the server does not
change and you are willing to restart
the web server if it does.
WP or Plugin updates =
CHANGE OF PHP CODE

APC.STAT = OFF
THINK AND PLAN BEFORE YOU TURN IT OFF

# /etc/init.d/apache2 restart
It’s just one line. Maybe not exactly
the same as this one, though.
And it’s only for a few seconds.

RESTARTING? SO WHAT?
There are other ways to deal with this but those are for
another time when we get real deep into server stuff

Ensure your server has:
php-pear, php5-dev, make, apache2-prefork-dev

# pecl install apc
Then add the extension to your php.ini (or other)

extension=apc.so

INSTALLING APC
Because it might be different for your ﬂavor of server I’m not
going into too much detail here, but it’s dead easy

apc.enabled=1
apc.shm_segments=1
apc.shm_size=128M (or 1G, etc.)
apc.ttl=3600
apc.user_ttl=7200
apc.gc_ttl=3600
apc.max_file_size=1M
apc.stat=1 (or 0)

CONFIGURING APC
You should tweak it as much as needed
And there’s a lot more you can tweak in APC

With APC installed you can use PHP
function calls to...
Manage the APC cache
Interrogate the APC cache
Load/Dump Binary cache data
START OPTIMIZING YOUR CODE
Integrate it selectively in your plugins

WORTH KNOWING
APC will also extend PHP with new functions

APC Object Cache Backend
http://wordpress.org/plugins/apc/
Place the object-cache.php
in your wp-content directory.
Optionally you can also install the
BATCACHE plugin

APC WITH A WP PLUGIN
Your mileage may vary

Apache = Process Based
Nginx = Event Based

APACHE V.S. NGINX
Because you might get a lot of visitors... all at the same time!

Asynchronous
Asynchronous = Scalability
Fewer Server Resources
(i.e. much less memory)
Better for heavy load sites

A FEW ADVANTAGES
On sites with light trafﬁc you will not see much difference in
performance between event vs. processed based servers

10.000 concurrent connections
and Nginx still uses only a few MB of
memory
Apache... 100’s of MB’s
And often will not even handle the load.

ALSO A COST DIFFERENCE
Part of the cost of virtual servers is the amount of memory that
is available. Disk space is not as important as memory.

Back in 2008...
8000 live trafﬁc requests per second
Apache would have fallen over
and DIED

WORDPRESS.COM
Big servers and big sites prefer Nginx... and now you know why

15MB of RAM and
10% of CPU resources
Apache and a pound load balancer
would freak out at the 1000th
process, using 400+MB RAM and
“leaking” 20MB RAM per hour

GAME OVER
Big servers and big sites prefer Nginx... and now you know why

WP development is “intertwined”
with the Apache world.
Support is “limited but growing”.

http://codex.wordpress.org/Nginx
http://wiki.nginx.org/WordPress

WORDPRESS & NGINX
Not quite a match made in heaven
You’ll have to do some marriage counseling

Nginx has no conceptual notion of
this thing called an .htaccess ﬁle
http://wordpress.org/plugins/nginx-helper/

Search for Nginx related WP plugins

WORDPRESS & NGINX
WHERE THE HECK DID MY .HTACCESS FILE GO?!

Caching HTTP Reverse Proxy
Proxy Servers are not just “the thing you set in your browser”

BROWSER

BROWSER

PROXY
SERVER

VARNISH

WEBSITE

WEBSITE

With Varnish YOU control the caching
(because not everyone uses a proxy)

VARNISH
And it really is... really really, really, REALLY FAST!

Cache on Disk
Cache in Memory
Control through VCL
(Varnish Cache Language)
VARNISH
You control the proxy and you control the resources

VARNISH
PORT 80

APACHE OR NGINX
PORT 8080

http://mysite.com

http://mysite.com:8080

Varnish points to a “backend” server
which happens to be itself but with
the web server on a different port

VARNISH SAME SERVER
Change the web server port to something else because
Varnish should respond on port 80

VARNISH
PORT 80

APACHE OR NGINX
PORT 8080

http://mysite.com
http://somesite.com
http://wowy.com
http://admin.com

http://mysite.com:8080
http://wowy.com:8080
APACHE OR NGINX
PORT 8081
http://somesite.com:8081
http://admin.com:8081

VARNISH DIFFERENT SERVERS
You can do the setup in whatever way you like

# Drop any cookies sent to Wordpress.
sub vcl_recv {
! if (!(req.url ~ "wp-(login|admin)")) {
! ! unset req.http.cookie;
! }
}
# Drop any cookies Wordpress
# tries to send back to the client.
sub vcl_fetch {
! if (!(req.url ~ "wp-(login|admin)")) {
! ! unset beresp.http.set-cookie;
! }
}

WP AND VARNISH
BEWARE OF COOKIES

MEMCACHED
The name of the game is “DISTRIBUTED”

The “for dummies” version:
Make better use of memory
Cache data in memory on
other servers that aren’t
using it as much.

AND IT DOES WHAT?
It manages cache and memory... for more than one server

DISTRIBUTED, I SAID
The more the merrier

System interconnects on servers
(depending on how you plan and set
them up) can still get more
performance over TCP/IP and
memory than a local server faced
with only its limited resources.
More servers = more memcached

WORDPRESS.COM
Yes, wordpress.com uses memcached. As do Twitter, Flickr,
Wikipedia, Craigslist, YouTube, and many others

$mc = new Memcache;
$mc->connect(‘10.0.1.20’, 11211);
$data = “cache this!”;
$mc->set(‘mydata’, $data, false, 100);
$result = $mc->get(‘mydata’);

MEMCACHED PHP
When installed Memcached will provide you a lot of PHP
functionality to have full control over your caching

BATCACHE
http://wordpress.org/plugins/batcache/

Place the advanced-cache.php
in your wp-content directory

“MEMCACHED PLUGIN”
Your mileage may vary

Single Malt Scotch
Hi Stefan!

Bourbon
Hi Mitch!

Tequila
Hi Kelly!

Beer
Hi Andrei!

LIFE IN THE SLOW LANE
If all this server and site performance is getting to you! :-)

http://eastbaywp.com/
http://www.stefandidak.com

DOWNLOAD THE SLIDES
Because this MAY have gone WAY too FAST for you!

Digital Ocean
https://www.digitalocean.com/

Redis
http://redis.io/

Linode
https://www.linode.com/

Memcached
http://memcached.org/

Rackspace
http://www.rackspace.com/

WordPress Batcache
http://wordpress.org/plugins/batcache/

Amazon VPC
http://aws.amazon.com/vpc/

WordPress APC Object Backend
http://wordpress.org/plugins/apc/

APC
http://php.net/manual/en/book.apc.php
XCache
http://xcache.lighttpd.net/

And finally, a “real developer’s” home office
because everyone keeps asking... :-)
http://www.stefandidak.com/office/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/didak/sets/72157633152434208/

eAccelerator
http://eaccelerator.net/


Zend OpCache/Optimizer/Platform
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zend_Technologies


Nginx
http://nginx.org/
Varnish
https://www.varnish-cache.org/

THINGS MENTIONED
In case you want to go look stuff up for yourself

QUESTIONS
Because I’m sure there’ll be some!

Making WordPress Fly

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