Back in December I blogged about “How Fast is your Wordpress Blog” Since then I have done a lot more research into this subject and I have come up with a few more ways to Speed up Wordpress and make it Digg Proof in the event of an extremely popular post.

<Disclaimer>
The following tips to speed up Wordpress are certainly not for the faint of heart, and I suggest you only attempt these with a good disaster recovery plan in place.
</Disclaimer>

One of the first and most successful techniques is to optimize your database.
Working daily on very large Oracle Databases I certainly know the importance of a well tuned database. Since pages are served dynamically, every page load in Wordpress results in a Mysql Query, and as stated in my first post on speeding up Wordpress the WP-Cache plugin helps to reduce these queries but it’s also important to make sure you have the Query Cache optimized for maximum performance.

To activate the Mysql Query Cache:

1. Find your mysql configuration file my.cnf
2. Find the setting query-cache-type & change the value to 1
3. Find the query-cache-size & change the value to 20M
4. Find the query-cache-limit & change the value to 2M

You will need to make sure your host allows root access to the server in order to do this tweak.

The next tip to try is using PHP Compiler Cache

The PHP Compiler cache saves scripts in their compiled format on the server so that they’re not getting recompiled every time you call them from Wordpress. It increases the performance of PHP scripts by caching them in their compiled state, so that the overhead of compiling is almost completely eliminated. It also optimizes scripts to speed up their execution. It typically reduces server load and increases the speed of your PHP code by 1-10 times.

Here are links to a couple of PHP Compiler Caches APC & eAccelerator

The final tip I have for today is to make sure you select the correct hosting company.

Unfortunately I initially selected one of the most incompetent hosting companies in the known universe for my personal blog, and I have had nothing but grief, angst, argument and downtime since joining….. The name of the worst hosting company in the world is ’smartyhost dot com dot au’, I won’t even link to them thanks how much they suck.　In spite of their total incompetence and lack of support and b-grade service I have still managed a reasonably fast Wordpress blog. I am saving all the problems with the worst hosting company in the world, for another blog post, and I will make sure I get the keyword SEO just right to ensure it gets 1st position on Google….. rant over….

The two hosting companies I looked at and reviewed are bluehost.com and micfo.com, but keep in mind micfo.com doesn’t accept credit card payments so you have to use paypal or wire transfer…. I elected to use bluehost.com. After this weekends Photo Hunt competition I will redirect my DNS to my new host with migrated blog and hopefully everyone will see another speed boost….

がんばてます

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