As Pink Cake Box has grown over the years, we’ve had to focus more time on optimizing site performance. In aggregate, we receive over 1/2 million unique visitors a month with over 2 million pageviews per month. We’ve also taken the non-traditional approach of allowing other sites to link directly to our images. In combination, all this traffic was putting a strain on our web server and was causing performance issues and web site crashes.
In conversations with our web hosting provider they claimed our traffic was in the top .01% of sites they host and the implementation of our web server was not optimized to handle such a load. They suggested we take a look at NGINX which is a lighter and faster web server as compared to Apache. (Check out this web server comparison they did)
We decided to take a different route and ended up implementing three options which appeared to have helped:
1) Optimized Xcache values
2) Implemented a content delivery netowork for static assets using Amazon Cloudfront
3) Optimized wordpress plugins/queries
Here are some details for others who may be having similar issues:
Optimizing xCache
Our web hosting provider offers Xcache for caching php pages, but the default values were not doing the job. After reading through this excellent xcache post from Chris Meisinger, I started testing a variety of different values for the slot and cache sizes (xcache.size & xcache.slots) and finally settled on optimal sizes that worked best with our site.
I used apache benchmark tool to help test different configuration options:
ab -n 1000 -c 20 http://blog.pinkcakebox.com
Implementing Amazon Cloudfront
Setting up Amazon cloudfront was a breeze. Dreamhost holds your hand through the process and the only work I really had to do was update our wordpress database and any HTML files to point to our new images.pinkcakebox.com.
We noticed a TREMENDOUS performance boost from this approach and it also helped ease the burden on Apache.
Note there are plenty of plugins to help ease the process of integrating Amazon Cloudfront/S3 with WordPress. I personally did not try any of them.
Optimized wordpress plugins/queries
Last but not least I spent time tuning some of my existing plugins and identified some troublesome bottlenecks in third-party plugins. I used this excellent plugin from Frank Bültge which lists all your wordpress queries with timings.
As a result of this exercise I was able to tune my search tags plugin as documented here.
The other bottleneck I had was with Version 3.2.4.2 of SexyBookmarks. It was adding 5 seconds of load time to my main blog page. I did NOT investigate if these performance issues were specific to the plugin itself or perhaps a conflict the Sexy Boomarks plugin and another plugin on the site.
All I know is that as soon as I disabled the plugin my wordpress load time decreased by 5 seconds. The folks at shareaholic.com do a great job maintaining this plugin so I’m more apt to believe it was some issue specific with our wordpress site (which is highly customized so I wouldn’t be surprised).