A lot of this is very subjective and hard to answer because of different server environments, themes, size of database etc. In your experience, when is the time one needs to start thinking about scaling up? If you are concerned with your users experience you should already be practicing sound front end performance techniques. When … Read more
You’re not going to get a noticeable difference doing it one way over another. Slowness comes from what the code is doing. If you’re worried about performance, just make sure you’re caching external requests whenever you can, that includes calls to the database.
Previous versions of WordPress didn’t really provide a good means to conditionally enqueue stylesheets and JavaScript within a plugin (i.e. only when needed). So most plugin authors enqueued both on every WordPress init/load, even if the plugin wasn’t being used on a given page. Current versions of WordPress allow for enqueuing later in the flow … Read more
How can I prepare() my wpdb query? I tried but couldn’t manage because of the second parameter. The prepare() works is explained in Codex, you need to have a query with placeholders and additional arguments to replace that placeholders. If you have no placeholders (so no variable parts in the query) then you can use … Read more
Hi Matthew Paulson, I see your using W3 Total Cache but your database and object cache is set to disk. Caching objects and your database to disk can actually have a negative performance effect especially if your getting that much traffic. You can read more about the effects on caching database and objects to disk … Read more
If possible get your PHP updated to the 5.4.x branch. Before you add your caching layer you need to determine whats slowing down MySql and PHP. You need to enable WP_Debug and eliminate any PHP errors. Look for undefined indexes, syntax errors and deprecated functions. That 20 second to first byte is all PHP, MySql … Read more
The actual RAM you need depends on many factors: plugins theme installed extensions (server and PHP) the current operation (editing images needs the most) translation, some translation files are really heavy In a multisite, some resources are shared, the server setup for example is not duplicated each time you create a new site. You can … Read more
There are some issues in WP permalinks implementation that introduce scaling issues for large amount of pages and some specific permalink configurations, see Category in Permalinks Considered Harmful. Other than that it is business as usual – use decent hosting, keep plugins setup efficient, add caching and you will be fine.
I guess the answer is that HHVM does not work with typical opcode caching, the compiler is not the same as “regular” PHP’s. HHVM has it’s own opcode caching that as far as I know does not integrate with APC or Zend’s OPcache, it does it’s own thing. In other words, it would be redundant. … Read more
I answered a similar question on Stack Overflow recently. Don’t forget that the profiler itself adds a big overhead. If your page loads are still really slow with XDebug disabled then I don’t think your problems are limited to translation files and you should look at caching entire pages. You can eliminate MO file loading … Read more