[wp-hackers] 5 minutes to a faster blog

[Matt Mullenweg]

With the following I regularly get sub 100 millisecond front-page 
generation time on photomatt.net, and lower on WP Pages. No caching 
plugins, no alternative front-ends that make me rewrite my themes and 
plugins, just plain WordPress.

1. Use APC:

http://pecl.php.net/package/APC

APC can give you a 3x speedup in load times, instantly.

Tip: If you're on Litespeed, use this to save memory:

http://www.litespeedtech.com/support/wiki/doku.php?id=litespeed_wiki:php:opcode_cache

(APC is bundled with Litespeed, btw.)

2. Enable the query cache:

nano /etc/my.cnf

[mysqld]
...
query_cache_size = 64M

/etc/init.d/mysql restart

This usually cuts in half most SQL times on busy sites, if not more.

3. Swich your tables to InnoDB

Use phpMyAdmin > table > Operations to switch.

And add the following in your MySQL config file, adjust sizes as 
necessary for your memory:

# Make buffer_pool larger than the size of your DB, if possible
innodb_buffer_pool_size=512M
innodb_additional_mem_pool_size=20M
innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit=0
innodb_log_buffer_size=8M

Restart MySQL.

4. Enable WP's built-in caching

define( 'ENABLE_CACHE', true ); // in wp-config.php

Unless you have slow HDs, like a NFS-based host like Dreamhost.

== More than 5 minutes, bonus ==

5. Use WP 2.1

It's way faster.

-- 
Matt Mullenweg
  http://photomatt.net | http://wordpress.org
http://automattic.com | http://akismet.com