gzipWTF is the easiest f***ing way to check for gzip and more. The purpose of this site is to aide web designers & developers in speeding up sites by pinpointing which resources are not being gzipped by the server, which resources are slow and which resources are causing 404s. Our mission is to increase awareness of site speed as an important part of the web's future. George Washington approves.

If you have multiple sites under HAProxy a good way we have found to configure it is to have a frontend/backend configuration. The frontend is what HAProxy listens on and it sends connections to the backend(s) which can be different sites and use different pools of web servers.

Varnish Cache is an open source, state of the art web application accelerator. You install it on your web server and it makes your website fly.

People everywhere complain that Wordpress is slow, or that they can’t survive a digg. They die if they get more than 10,000 visitors a day, their hosting providers ban them for using too many resources, and they cry because they have to purchase expensive hosting plans. If this describes your plight, before you run over to Survive Digg hosting and plunk down even more money, take a look at your Wordpress setup and LAMP stack. You can make them better.

eAccelerator is a free open-source PHP accelerator & optimizer. 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. eAccelerator typically reduces server load and increases the speed of your PHP code by 1-10 times.

I recently set up a new server to host website for my clients. I took the opportunity to re-think how I have been serving sites and optimize the whole software stack for better performance. Rather than the usual LAMP (Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP) stack, I decided to go with LEMP, switching Apache out for Nginx. Although most common PHP applications recommend Apache, they will actually run faster on Nginx. Usually all you just need to do is translate the .htaccess file rules into Nginx’s configuration file.

My first order of business once the new server was set up was to get WordPress running and to optimize its performance. The first few sites that would be going on the new hardware were using WordPress so although I will be going through a similar process for Expression Engine soon, WordPress was my test-case.

I always run the W3 Total Cache plugin with my WordPress installations. By storing copies of each rendered page to disk (as well as many other optimizations), W3TC dramatically decreases the load on the server under heavy traffic. This is particularly the case with the Nginx configuration I am about to show you, which lets most requests be handled by Nginx alone. Nginx was designed first and foremost as a reverse proxy, so it serves static files almost instantly and with minimal processor or memory usage. There are a number of sample configurations around the web for running WordPress with W3TC on Nginx, but none of them quite did it for me. For one thing, they all rely heavily on if statements, which are evil. So here is my take on it….

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Unravel The Music is a small startup; by that I mean we have no money, no financing, and we are owned and operated by two people. Therefore it is important that we get the most out of our server in terms of performance and cost and we have to do this without having to spend hours worrying about the server when we could be improving our design or code.

Varnish is the key software that speeds up your web site. It is Open Source, built on industry standards and requires very few resources.

e4rat ("Ext4 - Reducing Access Times") is a toolset to accelerate the boot process as well as application startups. Through physical file realloction e4rat eliminates both seek times and rotational delays. This leads to a high disk transfer rate.
Placing files on disk in a sequentially ordered way allows to efficiently read-ahead files in parallel to the program startup. The combination of sequentially reading and a high cache hit rate may reduce the boot time by a factor of three, as the example below shows.

e4rat is based on the online defragmentation ioctl EXT4_IOC_MOVE_EXT from the Ext4 filesystem, which was introduced in Linux Kernel 2.6.31. Other filesystem types and/or earlier versions of extended filesystems are not supported.

Page Speed Online analyzes the content of a web page, then generates suggestions to make that page faster. Reducing page load times can reduce bounce rates and increase conversion rates.

How fast does your webpage load?

There are many variables that affect a site's performance. The tools listed below can help you discover those variables and improve your site. We recommend that you experiment with these tools. Multiple simple changes can improve the experience for your users around the world by several seconds.

Ok, I have an Intel X-25M 160 GB SSD coming and I’m on a VERY GEEKY mood… so I decided to poke around a little on what could be done to tweak Mac OS X in order to, at least minimize the write amplification problem and also optimize the space used – yes you know the €/MB ratio is high on SSDs. Most of these tweaks, besides providing for a longer lifespan for SSD disks, should improve overall system performance even on an non SSD disk. Of course you will use them at your own risk…