performance
Improving site performance using asynchronous database writes and memcache in PHP
Web applications often have a requirement to log information about a request to a database. In a contrived example this could just be a global counter which attempts to amaze visitors to your site about how many requests you’ve handled in the last hour/day/week/month. One approach to doing this is to update a database each [...]
Faster is better – rethinking SQL queries to improve API response times
At the moment we’re redeveloping an existing JSON based API, which is used by a mobile application. We knew the performance of the previous release of the API was good – it’s been in use for the last two years without any problems, and easily outperforms a competitor’s API. However, our dataset size is due [...]
Varnish for WordPress Performance
How to improve WordPress/Apache performance on a relatively heavily loaded server using Varnish and more
WordPress Performance Case Study
Background A WordPress site we maintain had one page (warning: some of the pages/images may offend) displaying a large number of posts (they all happen to be galleries) using the nextgen-gallery plugin. The Problem The page in question, on each load, would perform a query on posts within a specified category, and display them inline. [...]
Performance enhancements for a bespoke PHP ecommerce store
Introduction Not so long ago, a customer was using an bespoke online store for selling clothing. For 99% of the year, the site would perform perfectly (fast page loading times and so on) – however at the start of a sales promotion, the site would collapse due to a huge spike in requests from potential [...]