Make Money from Blogs » Performance

Using Yahoo! YSlow to analyze web pages for performance (and more tips)

ashish — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 11:18:22 +0000

Improving the speed of your pages is normally pretty critical. If your pages are slow to load, then people quickly switch over, and even viewers who find the information on your pages useful tend to hesitate to come to your page more often; as for casual viewers, you can be pretty sure that they will switch fast if they find your page taking a lot of time to load.
You can take a number of steps to improve the performance of your page, but before that, you should be spending time to determine how the performance of your page actually is. You can get some idea just by loading your page and comparing the loading times of other pages, and there are a number of other tools that can help you determine the performance of your page. Many of these tools also help in giving you more details about which sections of your page cause overall bad performance.
One tool that can help you evaluate the performance of your sites is called Yahoo! YSlow (link to page):
Details about the tool are below.
YSlow analyzes web pages and suggests ways to improve their performance based on a set of rules for high performance web pages. YSlow is a Firefox add-on integrated with the Firebug web development tool. YSlow grades web page based on one of three predefined ruleset or a user-defined ruleset. It offers suggestions for improving the page’s performance, summarizes the page’s components, displays statistics about the page, and provides tools for performance analysis, including Smush.it™ and JSLint.
Details about performance optimization at Yahoo Developer Tools (link)

80% of the end-user response time is spent on the front-end. Most of this time is tied up in downloading all the components in the page: images, stylesheets, scripts, Flash, etc. Reducing the number of components in turn reduces the number of HTTP requests required to render the page. This is the key to faster pages.
Combined files are a way to reduce the number of HTTP requests by combining all scripts into a single script, and similarly combining all CSS into a single stylesheet. Combining files is more challenging when the scripts and stylesheets vary from page to page, but making this part of your release process improves response times.
A content delivery network (CDN) is a collection of web servers distributed across multiple locations to deliver content more efficiently to users. The server selected for delivering content to a specific user is typically based on a measure of network proximity. For example, the server with the fewest network hops or the server with the quickest response time is chosen.

The article above (link) contains a lot of details about how to increase performance, so make sure that you have read the page and evaluated which of these apply to you.

WordPress Plugin: Take control of your database access

ashish — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 19:14:58 +0000

WordPress depends on the Database for almost everything. All the values your enter, all your content, everything that goes to make your blog is actually stored in a Database, mostly MySql. It is very much possible to use a Database connectivity frontend, typically provided by your hosting service, but it requires somebody with technical talent to make that happen. Instead, why not try and use a tool from within your WordPress to make this happen.
Well, there is a WordPress Plugin that can make this happen, and it is called WP-DBManager 2.50 (available at this link)

Manages your WordPress database. Allows you to optimize database, repair database, backup database, restore database, delete backup database , drop/empty tables and run selected queries. Supports automatic scheduling of backing up and optimizing of database.

Go, ahead, and take control of the DB. Remember, for a WordPress site, the Database communication can make or break a site in terms of performance, so you should understand more about how your Database connectivity works.

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WordPress Optimization Tool: SQL Monitor

ashish — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 19:04:47 +0000

One of the ways in which you can optimize the performance of your WordPress site is by reviewing the processing of database calls in terms of frequency of such queries, the number of such calls being made, the performance of these calls, how optimized are they, and so on. It is not easy to determine all these numbers, and you will need a tool to help you determine these numbers. So, here is SQL Mintor (link to page)

WordPress can provide only the list of the queries and the developer has to manually run every query and analyze it. Very boring, isn’t it? SQLMon tries to help the developers and analyzes the query itself, reporting everything that needs attention.
The plugin is perfect for WordPress developers, plugin and theme developers and site administrators who are trying to find out why the blog is too slow

Optimizing your WordPress account – 2

ashish — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 18:09:48 +0000

A few weeks back, I had written about how to take some basic steps towards optimizing your WordPress account. Imagine what would happen if more people started promoting your WordPress Blog, or wonders of wonders, it appears on the front page of Digg or Slashdot. In such cases, unless you have optimized your WordPress configuration already, you can be pretty much sure that your account will get to a state where the server is not able to handle the load, and will shut down; further if your account is on a shared server, you might have some uncomfortable queries from your host.
So, here are some points on how to optimize your account:
1. Since WordPress works on a database system, it pulls every bit of content from the server. If there are a large number of requests for your blog, your server has to make that many DB queries to fetch the content. This puts a lot of stress on your server. User a Super Cache plugin to Cache some of the load and serve static HTML files instead of querying the DB (link to plugin, and page).
2. When you serve various files such as binaries, videos, images, scripts, etc from your server, it becomes slow. Place them on other servers, so that the load on your server is reduced. For example, you can get videos from Youtube and Photos from Flickr, and also, you can even hire some hosting space on another server or on a service such as Amazon S3 for this purpose.
3. If you are more advanced, look at your server logs; it may be possible to determine multiple requests from a bot or script that is of no good, blocking these may make your server behave a bit better
4. Look to get stats on how your web page is loading. If it takes a lot of time to load your page, there may be a lot of plugins working, or scripts loading, and so on. Some tools you can use for this purpose are – LiveHTTPHeaders (link, displays the HTTP headers), Firebug (link, Look at loading times for various artifacts on a page),
5. Inside your wp-config.php file, remove some of the DB calls that are not necessary. For example, hard-code your Template Path, Stylesheet path (link to relevant site). You will get some improvements.
6. Review your themes. Some themes call a lot of graphics, and overall call a lot of files. If your CSS files are divided into multiple files, combine them. Replace graphics wherever possible with text.
7. Review the plugins your are using to see whether they are required. Plugins can make your site much slower, especially if they do a lot of DB access and inefficient. If you are advanced technically, monitor the performance of your plugins.
8. Refer to this quick cheat sheet for DB optimization (link to cheat sheet)
9. Reduce the number of posts on the front page of your blog. Typically, WordPress gives you 10 posts on your front page, you should reduce this to 3-4.
10. Use WP’s Built in Object Cache as described on this page (link). From the same site, refer to the MySQL Query Cache.
11. For some detailed technical analysis of what can be done (link)
12. Clean Options (Finds orphaned options and allows for their removal from the wp_ options table) – Get it from this page
13. The combating comment spam page on WordPress.org (link). If you have a good blog which is getting popular, increase in spam is only to be expected. Akismet filters out most comment spam, but just getting it into the junk spam list also adds some load to your server.
14. Page with 5 tips for making your Blog Digg / Slashdot proof (link)
15. High Traffic Tips For WordPress on WordPress.org Codex (link)

If you know more ways beyond this, please do let me know.

Optimizing your WordPress account – 1

ashish — Sun, 31 May 2009 17:06:25 +0000

In 2 previous posts where I described problems with my WordPress account, the preliminary solutions prescribed were:
- Keep your WordPress account updated to the latest release
- Keep spam to a minimum, including emptying the Akismet spam folder on a regular basis

These are just temporary solutions, given that WordPress is supposed to be not yet including optimization code in it and as a result, takes more CPU than required (see a description of WordPress optimization deficiences on this page).

What are some of the other things you can do:
1. Review the list of plugins that are in use. A number of users download a number of plugins and keep them active. Each plugin is a performance hit of some sort, and you should review your plugins to see which of these plugins are really necessary vs. plugins that do not add much value and are a performance hit.
2. Use some sort of caching in order to prevent each page hit querying the database and slowing down the server. You can use WP-Cache (link) or you can use Word Super Cache (link)
3. Using graphics. If you have a number of graphics, those are additional graphics that need to be served to your users. As an example, refer this calculation from WordPress Codex:

For example, let’s say the front page of your blog calls upon 8 graphics to create the “look” of your blog’s design. Add to this number the various WordPress template files it takes to build your page. You’ve got the header, sidebar, footer, and post content area at a minimum. That’s four more “calls” to files on your site. For 100 visitors, those files get loaded 1200 times. For 1000 visitors, those files are accessed and loaded 12000 times. This increases your bandwidth and server activity.

4. Use spam filters such as Akismet to prevent comment spam
5. Try and get others to host your content. You have some great graphics or some analytics that need calculation which are done at run time. These also take server processing load, and is preferable to get content from elsewhere. For example, analyics information is also availabe at sites such as Google Analytics and all the calculation is done on those servers.