real talk about website performance : 5 must-haves

Website PerformanceReal Talk

Hi, I’m Josh@outlandishjosh — josh@pantheon.io

Pantheon isn’t a “Host”(we’re a Website Management Platform)

But, we do provide several metric tons of hosting.

(billions of pageviews a month)

Data centers took 2% of US power in 2012.

“Power, Pollution and the Internet,”New York Times, 2012

“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe.”

Theme belt

Theme belt

Login gasket

Login gasket

Plugin rotors

Theme belt

Login gasket

Plugin rotors

Theme belt

Emergency overdrive valve

Top Speed: 125 mph

Top Speed: 25,000 mph

REAL TALK: the keys to breakthrough performance aren’t* inside WordPress

* usually - we’ll talk about this again

source: http://talks.php.net/fluent15#/wpbench

Must Have #1: use a recent version of PHP

REAL TALK: It’s caches all the way down

If you care about performance, you care about caching in all it’s many manifestations.

OpCode Cache

C.R.E.A.M

REAL TALK: A vanilla WordPress homepage needs billions of CPU cycles.

Must Have #1.5: If you aren’t using OpCache, you are wasting your life.

Object Cache

C.R.E.A.M

REAL TALK: WordPress is the smartest (and slowest) thing in your stack.

Must Have #3: use a persistent object cache to prevent WordPress busywork

C.R.E.A.M

Page Cache

REAL TALK: 200x performance is... a lot

Must have #3: Reverse-Proxy Cache

REAL TALK: The DB is the ultimate bottleneck

Must have #4: If you aren’t using InnoDB and SSD disks,

you are wasting your life.

REAL TALK: you can’t throw hardware at a

performance problem and expect it to stay fixed.

Must Have #5

You don’t need an Einstein, but you do need an

expert.

REAL TALK: performance is hard. It takes constant

improvement to be great.

Good luck!