LearnByDoingIT

Let’s Make the Server Faster

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by

John
in

I subscribe to the belief that constant monitoring for performance improvement is counter productive.  At the same time, I am old enough to remember when each adjustment made a difference to constantly scarce resources.  At irregular intervals which occur after I notice something slow in the page being rendered in the browser I wait for an article addressing overall performance.

Today it was an article on the new Google Tool Page Speed which led me to tweak my WordPress servers and my Moodle servers.  The initial article referenced a site from Google Code entitled “Let’s make the web faster” which led me to not only look at page speed issues from a settings standpoint but also to add an overall PHP Accelerator which I thought I had in Fedora 10 but forgotten to move forward during upgrades last year.

A great deal of the settings that were easily addressable existed inside the WP-Super-Cache plugin that I use in all my sites.  I then added a PHP Accelerator, settling on APC after reviewing performance comparisons and maintenance strategies.  Somewhere along the way, gzip compression was enabled, and tested working and then it became disabled and although I uninstalled APC and rechecked gzip values it remained disabled although overall page performance improvements did not appear compromised.  Making a mental note to check into this the next time I take a minute and check out my server performances.   Something clearly stumbled into the compression routine and I will need to sort it out.

UPDATE:  I found a number of ACL errors that affected more than just the caching plugins by checking out everything thoroughly, and this gave me a better set of practices to install and maintain WordPress self-hosted sites.  I also had trouble with super caching, but solved that by setting AllowOverrides in httpd.conf correctly.  I like to learn.  The remaining itch to scratch is just what is going on with the compression.

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