Optimization Options for High Load Sites

  • I’ve inherited 2 fairly popular regional news sites. They’re getting between 10-20K unique hits per day. Sometimes more. The page views are much higher.

    We’ve got them on a fairly stout dedicated server, and only these two sites are running on it. We’ve enabled WP Fastest Cache and we’ve got them on Cloudflare (Free). We’ve had the server admins go in and tweak MySQL for better performance. And we’ve disabled anything on the server that’s not needed.

    Even with all that, the sites are performing very poorly. The load is often quite high and the page loads are slow.

    We’re considering implementing WP Smush, but that won’t resolve the MySQL issues we’re having.

    Basically, I have to update every plugin on-at-a-time. Then I have to repair the DB after every update. This makes for about a 4+ hour update process. The databases are only between 150-350MB, so they’re not huge, but they sure are slow.

    My question is this: What options do I have to improve the performance and speed of these sites? CDN? Run MySQL on a separate server? Something else?

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)

  • Well, if your database is the issue 2 things I would do:

    1. Switch to MariaDB, you should get slightly better performance. Switch is relatively simple for a server admin who knows how to do it.

    2. Consider implementing Memcached to cache database queries.

    You should also consider APC or xCache to cache PHP.

    On the other hand, consider W3TC or WP Rocket for caching inside WP. They are much better than WP Fastest Cache.

    Since you’re using Cloudflare, you wouldn’t need another CDN.

    If you’re using related posts plugin, they tend to be resource hungry. Consider switching or removing it.

    Thread Starter James

    (@jrmorris77)

    Viktor,

    Thank you for your reply!

    I’ve never heard of MariaDB before. Does it use the same syntax as MySQL and is it available for WHM servers?

    We’re using the free version of Cloudflare. We’re considering upgrading for these sites to see if it further improves performance.

    Thank you for your suggestions. We will look into these!

    Hey James,

    MariaDB is a fork of MySQL, but it’s better maintained. You can check out these instructions:
    https://documentation.cpanel.net/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=1507908

    And since you’re using WHM, check out this for Memcached:
    https://documentation.cpanel.net/display/EA/Apache+Module%3A+MemCache

    Cloudflare will definitely reduce the load on your server, but it won’t fix slow connection to database. That needs to be fixed at the source.

    I use this plugin to troubleshoot database and server issues, it performs various checks and tells you how long everything takes. It will help you narrow down your issues:
    https://en-us.www.ads-software.com/plugins/mywebtonet-performancestats/

    Thread Starter James

    (@jrmorris77)

    Viktor,

    Very informative and helpful. Thank you!

    No problem, hope that helps.

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
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