SEObat

Trying to optimize the response time of this blog (based on WordPress platform), I’ve found an interesting plugin that caches your WordPress based blog pages. The biggest problem of a shared hosting consist in a significant delay in connecting to the database at every page load. The plugin name is WP-SuperCache, a fork of the excellent WP-Cache by Ricardo Galli Granada.

The concept behind WP-Cache is very simple. WordPress is based on PHP that by definition is a resource greedy scripting language, especially server CPU and RAM, and when a blog page is requested, Wordpress core generate on-the-fly a static Html page to send to the web client. This procedure is done each time the browser requests a blog page. After enabling caching plugin, the Wordpress PHP core works only the first time because it saves on the server hard disk the generated Html page.

WP-SuperCache is the evolution of WP-Cache plugin. It works the same as WP-Cache with the addition of SuperCache mode. Enabling only the standard cache mode WordPress core saves file as wp-cache-####.html in wp-content/cache. SuperCache mode works like normal cache mode, but with some surprises.
Files are saved in wp-content/cache/supercache respecting the structure of the permalink of the blog. In practice, the directory tree is created with directory and subdirectories contained in your post permalink, with categories name and everything else in the URL.This caching method allows the webserver to work quickly because has all the directory tree on the filesystem.



Some recommended WP-SuperCache settings changes
After enabling the plugin there are two important things to set up:

1. Super Cache Compression: enabling this option allows you to save server bandwidth because all files served to the client are compressed.
2. Expiry Time: This option is the time in seconds after that the cache page will be deleted. I think the best setting is 43200 seconds (12 hours).

Finally WP-SuperCache is a good system to improve your blog performance, hopefully the benchmark below will convince you

The results show that WP Super Cache is a clear winner, performing 225% better than the older WP Cache. Here is the raw data I gathered during the test:

No caching:

Requests per second: 22.81 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 4383.559 [ms] (mean)
Time per request: 43.836 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate: 613.75 [Kbytes/sec] received

WP cache:

Requests per second: 872.30 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 114.640 [ms] (mean)
Time per request: 1.146 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate: 23549.46 [Kbytes/sec] received

Super cache (no compression):

Requests per second: 1518.90 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 65.837 [ms] (mean)
Time per request: 0.658 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate: 41150.81 [Kbytes/sec] received

Super cache (compression):

Requests per second: 1960.39 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 51.010 [ms] (mean)
Time per request: 0.510 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate: 53108.70 [Kbytes/sec] received

Thanks to elliottback.com for the benchmark data.

WP-SuperCache Website

Related links:







Social tagging: Cache Compression > Save bandwidth > Wordpress cache > Wordpress fast > WP-Cache > WP-SuperCache