Help me speed up HostingDiscussion' WordPress-based news site
- Thread starter Artashes
- Start date
OnTheCloud.co
Member
Same! Great work, @Artashes!
And we are not even done yet! Big changes were made, even bigger changes are still coming.
Before anything, I would like to thank 
@SharedGrid for the colossal investigative effort. All of what I am about to post is the result of Daniel's work, and nearly all of the words come from his messages to me.
After all of the work done to date, we started by looking at WHM, Apache, MySQL and PHP configuration of my VPS, particularly focusing on the performance of the machine itself. We immediately noticed a pretty high CPU usage, at times reaching 100%, most likely during a busier browsing activity. Daniel associated it with a couple of reasons:
The VPS is running a default version of MySQL 5.7, which went end of life in October 2023. While initial recommendation was to switch to MariaDB, for now, we just performed optimization.
The Apache configuration was default as cPanel ships it, which is very conservative out of the box. We performed optimization on ServerLimits and RequestWorkers.
We also performed OS and Kernel optimizations for better memory and process handling.
We switched php-cgi to php-fpm, as it's much superior in the way it handles PHP requests.
We updated php.ini settings to better suit WordPress.
These 5 improvements led to a dramatic decrease in server load, so the changes have definitely made a difference. The new averages at the moment were: 1.40, 1.08, 1.14 - whereas they were near between 3-4 before, 4 being the limit.
Query Monitor, installed to see how the site was performing in terms of queries to the database, was now showing that queries were completing in less than 0.1s which is excellent, but the page generation time was still varying between 5-7 seconds. There was also the issue of the other 2 columns taking longer to load in compared to the first.
To be continued.
@SharedGrid for the colossal investigative effort. All of what I am about to post is the result of Daniel's work, and nearly all of the words come from his messages to me.After all of the work done to date, we started by looking at WHM, Apache, MySQL and PHP configuration of my VPS, particularly focusing on the performance of the machine itself. We immediately noticed a pretty high CPU usage, at times reaching 100%, most likely during a busier browsing activity. Daniel associated it with a couple of reasons:
The VPS is running a default version of MySQL 5.7, which went end of life in October 2023. While initial recommendation was to switch to MariaDB, for now, we just performed optimization.
The Apache configuration was default as cPanel ships it, which is very conservative out of the box. We performed optimization on ServerLimits and RequestWorkers.
We also performed OS and Kernel optimizations for better memory and process handling.
We switched php-cgi to php-fpm, as it's much superior in the way it handles PHP requests.
We updated php.ini settings to better suit WordPress.
These 5 improvements led to a dramatic decrease in server load, so the changes have definitely made a difference. The new averages at the moment were: 1.40, 1.08, 1.14 - whereas they were near between 3-4 before, 4 being the limit.
Query Monitor, installed to see how the site was performing in terms of queries to the database, was now showing that queries were completing in less than 0.1s which is excellent, but the page generation time was still varying between 5-7 seconds. There was also the issue of the other 2 columns taking longer to load in compared to the first.
To be continued.
@SharedGrid continued investigation showed that we were hitting the performance limit of the CPU:
The problem we have is the ‘page generation speed’ which we've seen as low as 4 seconds and as high as 8 seconds depending on how many users are present on the forum and news site.
Daniel from SharedGrid is a fan of Litespeed (it offers the quickest TTFB and page loading speed for WordPress) as he brought it up a few times in this thread. Well, he gave it a try on our server and it didn't make a difference at all. This backed up the evidence that it's down to server hardware as we're at the absolute maximum it can perform.
These two screenshots of the optimizations he worked on show the before and after results. The real showstopper here is the huge boost in database performance.
Before
After
Personally, and without any exaggeration, that was one of the most interesting experiences and reads I've had in a long time, primarily of the way Daniel broke things down, eliminating issues one by one, finally narrowing down to the culprit in a totally scientific way. I asked for permission to copy some of the information from his emails, because I wanted everyone to see the work that he's done.
Stay tuned for more.
The problem we have is the ‘page generation speed’ which we've seen as low as 4 seconds and as high as 8 seconds depending on how many users are present on the forum and news site.
Daniel from SharedGrid is a fan of Litespeed (it offers the quickest TTFB and page loading speed for WordPress) as he brought it up a few times in this thread. Well, he gave it a try on our server and it didn't make a difference at all. This backed up the evidence that it's down to server hardware as we're at the absolute maximum it can perform.
These two screenshots of the optimizations he worked on show the before and after results. The real showstopper here is the huge boost in database performance.
Before
After
Personally, and without any exaggeration, that was one of the most interesting experiences and reads I've had in a long time, primarily of the way Daniel broke things down, eliminating issues one by one, finally narrowing down to the culprit in a totally scientific way. I asked for permission to copy some of the information from his emails, because I wanted everyone to see the work that he's done.
Stay tuned for more.
AscendNet
New member
There are indeed several key factors to consider when optimizing the speed of a WordPress site, and many of the suggestions you may have come across are quite common.
One effective approach is switching to LiteSpeed, a web server that significantly outperforms Apache in many scenarios. LiteSpeed offers enhanced performance, built-in caching, and better handling of high-traffic websites. We’d be happy to offer you a free trial on our LiteSpeed-powered servers, allowing you to directly compare it against your current Apache setup and see the potential improvements. (I see this has been already suggested and tried - but I am just dumping knowledge)
Additionally, enabling compression, such as GZIP or Brotli, can help reduce file sizes and speed up load times. If your site is content-heavy, optimizing images is crucial. Tools like ImageOptim, TinyPNG, or even built-in WordPress plugins can compress images without sacrificing quality. Also, consider how your images are served – if they’re hosted on the same server as your website, they might be contributing to the load. Offloading static assets (like images) to a Content Delivery Network (CDN) could distribute the load more efficiently and reduce latency by serving content from a location closer to the user.
Lastly, don’t overlook other performance tweaks like minimizing CSS/JavaScript, leveraging browser caching, and ensuring your database is well-optimized. By addressing these aspects, you can significantly enhance your site's performance.
If you'd like to chat further, feel free to drop me a message.
- Liam
One effective approach is switching to LiteSpeed, a web server that significantly outperforms Apache in many scenarios. LiteSpeed offers enhanced performance, built-in caching, and better handling of high-traffic websites. We’d be happy to offer you a free trial on our LiteSpeed-powered servers, allowing you to directly compare it against your current Apache setup and see the potential improvements. (I see this has been already suggested and tried - but I am just dumping knowledge)
Additionally, enabling compression, such as GZIP or Brotli, can help reduce file sizes and speed up load times. If your site is content-heavy, optimizing images is crucial. Tools like ImageOptim, TinyPNG, or even built-in WordPress plugins can compress images without sacrificing quality. Also, consider how your images are served – if they’re hosted on the same server as your website, they might be contributing to the load. Offloading static assets (like images) to a Content Delivery Network (CDN) could distribute the load more efficiently and reduce latency by serving content from a location closer to the user.
Lastly, don’t overlook other performance tweaks like minimizing CSS/JavaScript, leveraging browser caching, and ensuring your database is well-optimized. By addressing these aspects, you can significantly enhance your site's performance.
If you'd like to chat further, feel free to drop me a message.
- Liam
I had a little peek into what's it like to run HD's WordPress news site on LiteSpeed and it was killing it.
'Page generation time’ down to something like 1.6s, which is a massive improvement compared to the 4-8s we were seeing before. And that is prior to Litespeed caching enabled, so we can expect even better performance. 
And thank you for the kind gesture, Liam.
I wouldn't be surprised if this was a _huge_ portion of your TTFB cost. I love some classic CGI for simplicity, but performant it is typically not.
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