Jason Roe / Blog, Jason Roe - Web design, Development, SEO Advice

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For the last 3 weeks my blog has been running really, really slow. With the long weekend upon us, I decided to take some time to try and find / fix the issue. After 4 hours of poking around, it turned out to be a number of issues…

I assumed that when I moved to a blacknight VPS about 6 months ago something went a bit AWOL. I had a look at the server for CPU usage, memory, write speed & mysql and everything seemed to be fine. The main issue turned out to be with wordpress or a WP plugin.

When I looked at my wordpress database tables and noticed that I had 14,000 rows in the wp_options table. The rows consisted of rss requests from magpie. After I cleared them out I have seen an instant boost. The mysql query to do this is

Delete from `wp_options` where `option_name` LIKE ‘rss_%’;

This got me thinking about how I can speed up the blog a bit more. First port of call was wp-supercache.

Second thing I looked at was moving all my static files over to a CDN (content delivery network). I already had an Amazon s3 account setup, so I set up a new bucket with a CNAME’ed sub domain. I kept the same directory structure and redirected all css, gif, jpg, png & js files over to the s3.

PS: S3 is not a true CDN .. see amazon cloudfront for a real CDN solution.

After all the tweaks I have reduced page load time from 15 seconds to 4/5 seconds.

Let me know if you spot any issues.