MarkJaquith.com
Hosting Environment
- Linux (Debian, CentOS)
- Don't skimp on the RAM
- RAID 5 ($$$)
- Dual CPUs, fast CPUs ($$$)
Philosophy
- "Only as dynamic as it needs to be"
- When to plan ahead, when to go with the flow
PHP Preprocessing
- "Interpret" your code once
- APC, eAccelerator
Database
- Identify costly queries, identify unnecessary queries, and get rid of them
- "Freeze" your post queries (WP 2.0.x)
- Enable MySQL query caching
Object caching
- Forget the hard drive
- APC and Memcache
- Gotcha: non-initialized options
HTML caching
- WP-Cache2
- Gotcha: WP-Cache2 + APC
- WP-Cache2 tweaking: user-agnostic URIs
- RAID 5
HTML Compression
- Benefit: smaller pages
- Cost: CPU hit at higher compression rates
- Keep the objective in mind: more compression doesn't faster page loads
- The lowest level of compression gets you the best compression:cpu ratio
Okay, but how does it REALLY scale?
- Real world example: Hotair.com
- 83,965 daily page views (2.5 million a month)
- Dynamic loads under 0.200
- Near-instant cached loads
- Server load: 0.00 to 0.10
Beyond Your First Server
- Database on its own server
- Many cheap boxes
- Barry, take it from here