Hi @tlt,
I’m the author of WP2static.com, so have felt the pain on many large sites during testing/support.
Whilst I’ve got some pretty big performance improvements in the latest dev build of mine here: https://github.com/leonstafford/wordpress-static-html-plugin/releases
I’ve also found a lot of optimizations along the way.
– Fast WP is always better, so do the obvious and get WP faster
– nginx over Apache
– php-fpm over php
– increase the memory allocation in the PHP config, else it won’t take advantage of any extra memory you give the server
Using the batch size and crawl increment numbers in my plugin squeezes out a tonne more performance, but I’ve got an idea to easily squeeze more out in a future release, this will only be when running from browser, not CRON/CLI, but I’ll start making 4 requests simultaneously from the browser to server, forcing more PHP threads. This will work in situations where I’ve upgraded a VPS to 16GB RAM and high CPU, but still can’t get any faster without scaling horizontally.
If you have just one WP website you need to optimize, I can also recommend using the Twig templating, with it’s page/object caching. No experience with it myself, but have seen some amazing performance issues solved with it by others.
Cheers,
Leon