Systems Wrangling Session At WordCamp Developer Day

What is the current status of web servers…Is Apache 2.x “fast enough?â€
Automattic uses Lightspeed (for PHP), nginx (for static content), and Apache (for media uploads). For WordPress-generated content, all server options are approximately the same speed.
What about APC?
Automattic uses beta versions of APC, and provides a 3-5x performance increase. It’s tied closely to the PHP [...]

WordPress 2.8 Script Handling

jQuery 1.3.2 is in WordPress 2.8, but the most exciting changes are in the automatic concatenation and compression of scripts via the script loader.
Andrew Ozz says “This feature can easily be extended to include scripts added by plugins and to use server side caching, however that would require some changes to the server settings (.htaccess [...]

MySQL Slow Query Log Analysis

Peter at MySQL Performance Blog pointed out this sweet perl script to analyze MySQL’s slow query logs. (This is supposedly a PHP port.)
The script does a good job of aggregating similar queries (those that only differ in their query values) and displaying overall stats for them. The following two queries are showing up a lot [...]

Looking Back At Mac Hardware Performance

I recently replaced the Mac Mini I use to host my web development with a PowerMac G4. (Story: the Mini was mine, a personal purchase I made to support my work on Scriblio and other WordPress-related projects, but recent changes in our network and firewall policy made the machine inaccessible from off-campus without using the [...]

Website Performance vs. Crawl Rate

Simple fact of The Google Economy: people can’t find stuff if it’s not indexed in major search engines. A slow site might not seem as bad as blocking the crawlers that search engines use to index your content, but it does seriously affect the depth and frequency of crawling they do.
The above is Google’s report [...]

Scaling PHP

This two year old post about Rasmus Lerdorf’s PHP scaling tips (slides) is interesting in the context of what we’ve learned since then. APC now seems common, and it’s supposedly built-in to PHP6. Still, I’d be interested in seeing an update. Are MySQL prepared statements still slow?
And that’s where Rasmus’ latest presentation comes in. We [...]

Amazon To Offer Content Delivery Services

Via an email from the Amazon Web Services group today:
…we are excited to share some early details with you about a new offering we have under development here at AWS — a content delivery service.
This new service will provide you a high performance method of distributing content to end users, giving your customers low latency [...]

NFL Powered By WordPress

WordPress.com VIP hosts some high-traffic sites, including Gizmodo’s live coverage of the iPhone 3g introduction. Now that the NFL has selected the service for their blogging we’ll get a chance to see how they handle the Superbowl rush.

More Web Performance Tips From Steve Souders

Hearing Steve Souders at WordCamp last week got me thinking about website performance, so I went looking for more. The slides from his WordCamp talk are online, but he gave a similar talk at Google I/O which got videotaped and posted richer detail than his slides alone will ever reveal.
Also on his blog: Use the [...]

MySQL Performance Monitoring Tips From The MySQL Newsletter

Google turned this up, but i have no idea how old it is: How to Monitor MySQL’s performance.