TJ Stein gave a really good presentation at WordCamp Chicago 2011 about scaling and performance issues with WordPress installations. He focuses a lot on using ngnix instead of Apache, but also covers PHP object caching, Varnish, CDNs, benchmarking, etc. It’s a good overview of current practices, but there’s also a lot of specific tips throughout.
All posts in Performance
Mark Maunder benchmarked several performance tuning measures with a WordPress installation on a VPS server to show which are most effective. The biggest improvements were from installing PHP-APC , setting up Nginx to proxy concurrent connections for Apache, and using MySQL’s query cache.
Apache’s default settings assume it’s running under a dedicated box with at least 2GB of RAM, so they don’t perform very well in a VPS that may only have 500MB. I recently made some tweaks to several VPS’s that reduced memory usage by 300-400MB without degrading performance. Apache Performance Tuning is a good article that explains a lot… [more]
Ian Gilfillan’s article on using indexes in MySQL has a good explanation of how to use the EXPLAIN statement to analyze a query, and what to look out for. You can also check out Jesse Farmer’s optimization tips for a primer on more advanced techniques.
