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This is what Mike Peters says he can do: make your site run 10 times faster. His test bed is "half a dozen servers parsing 200,000 pages per hour over 40 IP addresses, 24 hours a day." Before optimization CPU spiked to 90% with 50 concurrent connections. After optimization each machine "was effectively handling 500 concurrent connections per second with CPU at 8% and no degradation in performance." Mike identifies six major bottlenecks:
  • Database write access (read is cheaper)
  • Database read access
  • PHP, ASP, JSP and any other server side scripting
  • Client side JavaScript
  • Multiple/Fat Images, scripts or css files from different domains on your page
  • Slow keep-alive client connections, clogging your available sockets Mike's solutions:
  • Switch all database writes to offline processing
  • Minimize number of database read access to the bare minimum. No more than two queries per page.
  • Denormalize your database and Optimize MySQL tables
  • Implement MemCached and change your database-access layer to fetch information from the in-memory database first.
  • Store all sessions in memory.
  • If your system has high reads, keep MySQL tables as MyISAM. If your system has high writes, switch MySQL tables to InnoDB.
  • Limit server side processing to the minimum.
  • Precompile all php scripts using eAccelerator
  • If you're using WordPress, implement WP-Cache
  • Reduce size of all images by using an image optimizer
  • Merge multiple css/js files into one, Minify your .js scripts
  • Avoid hardlinking to images or scripts residing on other domains.
  • Put .css references at the top of your page, .js scripts at the bottom.
  • Install FireFox FireBug and YSlow. YSlow analyze your web pages on the fly, giving you a performance grade and recommending the changes you need to make.
  • Optimize httpd.conf to kill connections after 5 seconds of inactivity, turn gzip compression on.
  • Configure Apache to add Expire and ETag headers, allowing client web browsers to cache images, .css and .js files
  • Consider dumping Apache and replacing it with Lighttpd or Nginx. Find more details in Mike's article.


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