Orangescale Studio

I don’t have very large/busy personal sites to handle right now. To be more specific, I don’t use publishing platform optimization techniques too much. In the last few months, I need to work/deal with something what we all call “optimization”.

At the moment, I maintain busy sites powered by WordPress and vBulletin. My responsibility is to keep both softwares updated, modified when necessary, and also tweaked using plugins/modifications. The vBulletin has a good performance. The vBulletin-powered site I maintain receives around 1,000-1,200 new posts everyday, with 600-800 online users during peak hours and it’s on a single VPS server. On the same server, there are also two busy WordPress-powered sites.

Related to vBulletin, I applied some optimization strategies and it works almost without problem. The problem occurred on the WordPress-powered sites. During the peak hours, server performance was not good enough. Many webserver and database processes. I tried to use caching method using available WordPress cache plugins. But, it was not helping. I outsourced the static files to Amazon S3 (with CloudFront). It solved some problems.

After some moments, I decided to turn off all cache/optimization plugins installed and switched to WordPress Super Cache plugin. Did it work? Yes. The server performance is pretty stable now. During peak hours, all sites are running without any problems.

But, what does it mean? Keeping the server running without any problems is not an option. It’s a must. Visitors should have a good experience enjoying the service.