Web caching is the caching of web documents (e.g., HTML pages, images) in order to reduce bandwidth usage, server load, and perceived "lag". A web cache stores copies of documents passing through it; subsequent requests may be satisfied from the cache if certain conditions are met.
.htaccess is a very ancient configuration file for web servers, and is one of the most powerful configuration files most webmasters will ever come across. This htaccess guide shows off the very best of the best htaccess tricks and code snippets from hackers and server administrators.
You've come to the right place if you are looking to acquire mad skills for using .htaccess files!
One of the biggest speed bottlenecks of sites today are images, specifically unoptimized images or large scaled images. With Apaches Rewrite module we can convert all existing jpegs and png files (and most gifs) to webp, then transparently rewrite them so that a request for img.png from a browser that supports webp will receive img.webp.
Using memcache for me personally and the client sites I work on, has improved performance by over 1000%, in some cases even higher than that. It is a truly revolutionary way to optimize the performance of MySQL queries, remote requests such as to twitter or other apis, and this article is step 1. Plan is to go all the way to step 10 in future articles, it it grossly underused and misused in the WP world.
I have written more than a few articles detailing how to improve the speed of a website, and due to popular demand, this post will detail all the latest and greatest caching tricks and techniques that I utilize and love. The AskApache Best-Practices.
The goal is to add the HostGator server to be an exact mirror of the s.askapache.net domain, then to add that server as a 2nd A record to my DNS zone. That way half the visitors to the size will be taking up resources and bandwidth on the HostGator server instead of mine.
Round Robin A records in DNS are intended to evenly distribute queries between each host of the same name. Using some tricks straight out of a hackers toolbox we can verify if the distribution is taking place. (It is.)
NOT a typo.. 30x is measurable, well-documented, and easily tested. This is what open-source is about. I haven’t had time to post much the past year, I'm always working! So I wanted to make up for that by publishing an article on a topic that would blow your mind and be something that you could actually start using and really get some benefit out of it. This is one of those articles that the majority of web hosting companies would love to see in paperback, so they could burn it.
To prepare for several upcoming articles on AskApache that are focused on optimizing Servers and Sites from a server admin level, here is an article to introduce the main tools that we will be using. These tools are used to optimize CPU time for each process using nice and renice, and other tools like ionice are used to optimize the Disk IO, or Disk speed / Disk traffic for each process. Then you can make sure your mysqld and httpd processes are always fast and prioritized.
If you want to pre-load .flv / .mp3 files into a visitors browser cache using flash, here's the actionscript I use to do it, and some ideas behind a good javascript implementation using swfobject or ufo.
If you desire SPEED from your WordPress blog, the #1 speed improvement comes from using the WP-Cache Plugin. If you still desire SPEED after installing the Plugin, you can modify the WP-Cache Plugin code to make your blog even faster!
How I was able to preload many flash flv and swf files on one of my clients sites that has a lot of online video and relatively small traffic. Their site visitors would usually watch 3-10 videos per visit and so to make the videos load almost instantly on every page I came up with a way to preload the top 10 .flv files and the swf flv player files as soon as the visitor successfully started watching the 1st video. Of course I also setup .htaccess caching on the server so that once they downloaded the files into their cache they would never request them from the server again. I was having fun with this so its pretty funky and uses some really cool combinations of javascript, swf preloader from xml, css classes to help automate it all..
A plugin built to generate static files from php+mysql for Apache to serve the way its supposed to be.. My dream. Conclusion: Needs some improvement, pretty sweet though.
This explains the basic methods to get started caching with php headers
If you examine the preferences dialog of any modern Web browser (like Internet Explorer, Safari or Mozilla), you'll probably notice a 'cache' setting. This lets you set aside a section of your computer's hard disk to store representations that you've seen, just for you. The browser cache works according to fairly simple rules. It will check to make sure that the representations are fresh, usually once a session (that is, the once in the current invocation of the browser).
