Speeding Up This Site

I know this site is more than a little slow on occasion. I also know that the static site www.xom.nu which is hosted on the exact same server runs like a bat out of hell, so it’s likely not the server hardware (Mac Mini) or network connection (Speakeasy DSL) that’s at fault. The remaining candidates are:

• PHP (Very likely)
• WordPress (Maybe, but unlikely except in so far as it’s written in PHP)
• Traffic volume (especially comment spammers)
• MySQL (Possible, but I tend to doubt it.)

I’ve got a lot of suggestions for improving performance, and I plan to start trying some of them. I don’t, however, have any good measurements of where this server is spending its time. I’d appreciate it if anyone could share knowledge and experience as to how to determine where the server is taking it’s time, and how to find out what’s making it so slow. Thanks.

The first thing I’ve tried is installing Bad Behavior to try to keep spambots from eating up resources on the site. It’s not the most likely solution, but it was the simplest to set up. Let me know if this causes problems for you.

Next up I should try WP-Cache 2.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 16th, 2007 at 11:10 AM and is filed under Blogging, Software Development, Web Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the Atom feed. You can make a comment, Digg this story, or trackback from your own site.