Matt Kirman

As a quick followup to my previous post detailing how to run WordPress behind a Nginx reverse proxy I thought I’d post an interesting graph retrieved from Google Webmaster Tools showing page load times of this site over the past few months:

I switched to the Nginx/Apache configuration just before the start of June and, thankfully, it appears that the performance increase I noticed has also been observed by others.

Additionally, Google reports that the slowest load time was a shocking 5,572ms with a fastest time of 225ms. Not too shabby from a single 256MB server.

Recently I’ve wondering whether it was worth trying to improve my WordPress-based blog performance. While it wasn’t particularly terrible, waiting over 2 seconds just to load a single page isn’t exactly stunning.

I took a typical approach and installed the WP Super Cache plugin. Page loads dropped down to ~1 second. Much better, but there must be some more performance gains to be found somewhere without modifying the WordPress source code itself.

Inspired by this post by Mark Maunder I decided to see if I could shoehorn WordPress into a similar reverse proxy/persistent process mould. So far, it works brilliantly.

With the following tweaks I managed to go from 12 requests/s to over 30 requests/s on the same hardware – a single 256MB Rackspace Cloud server – whilst reducing latency from ~2 seconds to an average of only 0.4 seconds.

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