Steps to Increase Site Speed

[Andy R]

I wanted to post a quick announcement to let you all know that I have a few things in the works to speed up the speed of our site. The first step was accomplished last night when the largest site on our servers was migrated off. The second will happen next week when we switch from lighttpd to Apache (which should be more stable and cause less 500 errors) and lastly I have another huge web server going online once we are on Apache which should give us a large amount of extra capacity to grow. I also changed the way the Google ads load so they should not prevent the page from rendering like some people reported.

Thanks for your patience regarding site speed. I hope that we can get things highly optimized so that your experience is enjoyable.

Regards,

Andy

[Rich_in_Tampa]

I bet Apache will make a large difference. Thanks, Andy.

[Andy R]

Yeah, I am excited to go back to Apache.

[Tomcat98]

Thanks Andy!

Tomcat98

[CybrMike]

If not already installed, might want to install eAccelerator. It caches PHP scripts. Benchmarks put it at about 4x the speed of just Apache + PHP.

[Andy R]

Originally Posted by CybrMike

If not already installed, might want to install eAccelerator. It caches PHP scripts. Benchmarks put it at about 4x the speed of just Apache + PHP.

Currently XCache is running with lighttpd. We will definitely use eAccelerator when we switch to Apache. It's an amazing tool.

For those of you who read these but don't keep up with this stuff, these caching tools basically store the processed php scripts in RAM (which is very fast) so when a page is called the server does not have to read and process them each time from the hard drive (which is very slow & creates more load). Here is a wikipedia link to eAccelerator. They offer huge performance gains and if you have a website that runs on PHP you should check to see if your host offers php caching.

We are also using a tool called memcache (wikipedia link) that helps cache on the database side of things.