Meet Surge, a brand new page caching plugin for WordPress. It’s extremely fast and has no configuration screens. There is no learning curve, the plugin works just by activating it. Surge stores cache files on the filesystem, leveraging the Linux kernel page cache for efficient in-memory caching and invalidation. In various load tests, Surge has shown to easily handle 1000-2500 requests per...
Redis vs Memcached vs file_get_contents
I read articles about web performance and scaling almost every day, and when it comes to caching, the vast majority of them promote tools like Redis and Memcached, which are really fast, in-memory key-value stores. Their performance metrics, the requests per second, how easy it is to scale them and all their great features, will often overshadow the fact that these are services designed to run on...
Page Caching on the Filesystem
A few months ago I set out to build a page caching plugin for WordPress from scratch and streamed it live. The result was a simple filesystem-based advanced-cache.php implementation. It was nowhere near perfect, but it worked. It worked so well, that I decided to put some more effort into it, and I’m happy to report that it’s been running successfully on some production sites...
Disable Object Cache Addition/Invalidation in WordPress
You can temporarily disable object caching in WordPress by calling: wp_suspend_cache_addition( true ); Ref. You can turn addition back on by passing false as the only argument. There’s a similar approach for object cache invalidation. However, there’s a big chance persistent object caching plugins won’t implement these functions like WordPress built-in object caching does, so...
Get an Expired Transient in WordPress: Good Idea or Crazy Talk?
I wonder if there’s an easy way to get an expired transient in WordPress? Now, for this to make sense I guess I should provide a little more context, so here it goes :) The Transients API is an extremely easy way to cache parts of your WordPress code, that may be CPU/memory intensive, or rely on a third-party server and so on. A great example is grabbing a tweet from Twitter and caching it...
Every Millisecond Counts: Page Speed for Firebug
Here’s a little video that we’ve seen at Arvind’s and Sreeram’s presentation about speeding up the web at the Google Developer Day 2009 conference in Moscow. Inspiring isn’t it? Arvind and Sreeram talked about a very nice plugin for Firefox (built upon Firebug) which is called Page Speed, developed and maintained by the Googlers. You may read more about the plugin on...
WordPress: The template_redirect Hook Returns 404
This is a real quick one. I’ve started using the W3 Total Cache plugin a few days ago which I’m totally satisfied with. Unlike the WP Super Cache plugin, W3TC can keep the caches in memory via memcached, serve the static content through CDNs. The guys at W3 Edge promised to add Amazon CloudFront compatibility which I’m very excited about. As we all know (I guess) Mashable is...
Foller.me: MySQL Tweaking & Optimization
As I mentioned in the interview with @enked on his website Chidimar.com, I had serious problems with MySQL database optimization on the Foller.me project. The current public stable version (beta-1) is using the MyISAM engine and it’s not holding much data – profiles, locations, geo points for the followers geography. In the new version (currently dev-1 and hopefully beta-2 in a few...
Linux Dummy: Unscheduled Maintenance
If anyone of you have tried to access the blog yesterday night, you might have noticed that nothing was working. Sorry! I’ll say it straight, it’s completely my fault. Yesterday evening I decided to set up a cron job for automatic backups on my VPS – a full MySQL dump and a compressed archive of the www directory. So I got a couple of error messages stating that I don’t...
Give WordPress the iPhone Look: wpTouch Plugin
I don’t want to talk much about the wpTouch plugin, cause it’s all well documented over here. I’m writing this post for those of you who are afraid to make the first step to the terrific handheld view. Yeah, iPhone has got the Safari browser which can show my page just as it is shown on PC, and it even executes javascript! That’s the main reason why people don’t...