We’ve made some pretty big improvements in performance since we launched but, as you point out, there’s still plenty to do.

As with most development, we face the constant quandary: Should we tweak what we already have or add something a feature?

We’d have to do some major work to get complete optimization and probably have to move away more and more from WordPress. Overall, WordPress and plug-ins have been an extremely effective platform.

Again, thanks for your help. We hope to get at least some of your suggestions implemented shortly.

Michael and Will know the server configuration a lot better than I, but this is a great topic, so I thought I’d jump in. Lots of people are racing to prototype with apps like WordPress and then having to scramble to optimize once they get popular. Scaling open-source applications is turning into a business in and of itself.

I’m glad someone else finds the topic interesting. I find speeding up sites captivating, but I’m well aware that I’m probably in a minority among web developers.

I think you’re right about scaling open source applications being a business itself. More on that in a few weeks. :-)

BTW, one saving grace of the ad network things is that the browser will only open two http connections per domain. So ad network files can be downloaded concurrently with you own files because they are coming from the ad network’s domain.

Yeah, concurrent connections mask the issue almost completely when the offsite request completes first (unfortunately not the case here much of the time). Ad calls are tough to complain about, though, considering the revenue. I would love to have a little more control over the scripts…

Michael and Will know the server configuration a lot better than I, but this is a great topic, so I thought I’d jump in. Lots of people are racing to prototype with apps like WordPress and then having to scramble to optimize once they get popular. Scaling open-source applications is turning into a business in and of itself.

How would you recommend handling ad serving scripts? We don’t have much control there.

I’m giving this some thought. Going through the exercise of looking at Truemors got me thinking about the difficulty of building fast sites when you are bringing in content from other areas and using plugins. I need more time to noodle on this. :-)

BTW, one saving grace of the ad network things is that the browser will only open two http connections per domain. So ad network files can be downloaded concurrently with you own files because they are coming from the ad network’s domain. For this reason, I think the javascript files served from Truemors itself is likely to be the place for the greatest improvement.

WordPress and its plugins like to add prototype / scriptaculous scripts. We can flip to protoculous but have to change the guts to look for the new script every time we upgrade.

Exactly. The plugins give you functionality, but cause an undeniable performance hit because of the number of http requests. But you generally don’t want to modify plugins because they will cause you to maintain them all on upgrade.

The simple thing for the moment is to consolidate all of the javascript that is from outside of plugins (basically, the ones that Truemors itself is contributing) and see if you what happens if you modify the wordpress templates to put the javascript at the bottom of the page. You’ll want to test carefully after you move the javascript because some javascript has to be in the head of thee document. Yahoo’s 13 performance guidelines does a good job of describing when this is true.

Not sure what’s up w/ gzip - I thought that or mod_deflate was already so.

Truemors is running mod_gzip. I didn’t look carefully enough. The YSlow plugin gives grades on things like gzip. It gives Truemors an ‘F’ on gzip and I didn’t look further. However, after Guy pointed out that his partner (you?) thought gzip was on, I took a closer look and realized that YSlow was only complaining about files that were included by what I presume is your ad network.

The vast majority of the files are gzipped and only a handful are not. I made a mistake about that. Sorry for the confusion.

I’m going to noodle a bit more on the plugin and ad network items. Ad networks maybe unsolvable other than applying pressure on them. I know when Google first released Google Analytics, the javascript wasn’t gzipped so I and other bugged them until they changed it.

For plugins, I’m wondering if there is a way to intercept the insertion of the javascript using another plugin to replace Wordpress’s built-in javascript processing functions. A plugin to rule them all so to speak. :-)

WordPress and its plugins like to add prototype / scriptaculous scripts. We can flip to protoculous but have to change the guts to look for the new script every time we upgrade.

Not sure what’s up w/ gzip - I thought that or mod_deflate was already so.

Thanks for the insight.

FWIW, I came across the video on a blog post that was about Videos that Can Change Your Organization.

There were a couple of videos on that page that stood out to me, but the idea that:

If you make meaning, you will probably make money. But if you set out to make money, you certainly won’t make meaning and you probably won’t make money.

This resonated with me in a big way. It reminded me of what I value and what I wanted to accomplish in life. The right message at the right time.

-Jason