# Speed up your Wordpress site with a cache system
I was reading articles about caching systems for Wordpress, and I found many conflicting opinions: or completely pro cache or absolutely against cache framework.
I then decided to make a simple test to verify if it was really useful to have a cache on this blog (I've W3 Total Cache installed since the beginning) and here you are the results...
NB. On my nginx web server I've gzip activated on both tests with a browser cache for all static files.
Without cache
MacBook-Pro-di-Marco:~ mmornati$ ab -n 100 -c5 http://blog.mornati.net/
This is ApacheBench, Version 2.3 <$Revision: 655654 $>
Copyright 1996 Adam Twiss, Zeus Technology Ltd, http://www.zeustech.net/
Licensed to The Apache Software Foundation, http://www.apache.org/
Benchmarking blog.mornati.net (be patient).....done
Server Software: nginx/1.4.3
Server Hostname: blog.mornati.net
Server Port: 80
Document Path: /
Document Length: 55299 bytes
Concurrency Level: 5
Time taken for tests: 65.994 seconds
Complete requests: 100
Failed requests: 0
Write errors: 0
Total transferred: 5576900 bytes
HTML transferred: 5529900 bytes
Requests per second: 1.52 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 3299.694 [ms] (mean)
Time per request: 659.939 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate: 82.53 [Kbytes/sec] received
Connection Times (ms)
min mean[+/-sd] median max
Connect: 173 321 79.4 317 483
Processing: 1676 2906 587.0 2845 4604
Waiting: 1068 2113 596.4 2058 3726
Total: 2038 3226 577.0 3178 4947
Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
50% 3178
66% 3424
75% 3673
80% 3720
90% 3873
95% 4160
98% 4779
99% 4947
100% 4947 (longest request)
With W3C Total Cache
MacBook-Pro-di-Marco:~ mmornati$ ab -n 100 -c5 http://blog.mornati.net/
This is ApacheBench, Version 2.3 <$Revision: 655654 $>
Copyright 1996 Adam Twiss, Zeus Technology Ltd, http://www.zeustech.net/
Licensed to The Apache Software Foundation, http://www.apache.org/
Benchmarking blog.mornati.net (be patient).....done
Server Software: nginx/1.4.3
Server Hostname: blog.mornati.net
Server Port: 80
Document Path: /
Document Length: 55619 bytes
Concurrency Level: 5
Time taken for tests: 2.994 seconds
Complete requests: 100
Failed requests: 0
Write errors: 0
Total transferred: 5640878 bytes
HTML transferred: 5617244 bytes
Requests per second: 33.40 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 149.717 [ms] (mean)
Time per request: 29.943 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate: 1839.70 [Kbytes/sec] received
Connection Times (ms)
min mean[+/-sd] median max
Connect: 16 21 2.6 21 29
Processing: 81 125 18.5 121 186
Waiting: 34 54 15.3 52 105
Total: 105 145 18.4 141 207
Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
50% 141
66% 148
75% 155
80% 158
90% 169
95% 184
98% 200
99% 207
100% 207 (longest request)
I think the results are impressive:
4947 vs 207 ms = 2289,855% better with the cache activate
You have to set correctly your Wordpress cache framework to prevent caching problems; for example, new post not shown on the homepage... but, I think you should have a caching framework on a wordpress website!
If you decide to use it with the NGINX web server, here you are my configuration.
server {
listen 5.135.145.38:80;
server_name blog.mornati.net;
root /usr/share/nginx/blog;
index index.php index.html index.htm;
access_log /var/log/nginx/blog.access.log;
error_log /var/log/nginx/blog.error.log;
# Use gzip compression
# gzip_static on; # Uncomment if you compiled Nginx using --with-http_gzip_static_module
gzip on;
gzip_disable "msie6";
gzip_vary on;
gzip_proxied any;
gzip_comp_level 5;
gzip_buffers 16 8k;
gzip_http_version 1.0;
gzip_types text/plain text/css application/json application/x-javascript text/xml application/xml application/xml+rss text/javascript image/png image/gif image/jpeg;
# Rewrite minified CSS and JS files
location ~* \.(css|js) {
if (!-f $request_filename) {
rewrite ^/wp-content/w3tc/min/(.+\.(css|js))$ /wp-content/w3tc/min/index.php?file=$1 last;
# Use the following line instead for versions of W3TC pre-0.9.2.2
# rewrite ^/wp-content/w3tc/min/([a-f0-9]+)\/(.+)\.(include(\-(footer|body))?(-nb)?)\.[0-9]+\.(css|js)$ /wp-content/w3tc/min/index.php?tt=$1&gg=$2&g=$3&t=$7 last;
}
}
# Set a variable to work around the lack of nested conditionals
set $cache_uri $request_uri;
# POST requests and urls with a query string should always go to PHP
if ($request_method = POST) {
set $cache_uri 'no cache';
}
if ($query_string != "") {
set $cache_uri 'no cache';
}
# Don't cache uris containing the following segments
if ($request_uri ~* "(\/wp-admin\/|\/xmlrpc.php|\/wp-(app|cron|login|register|mail)\.php|wp-.*\.php|index\.php|wp\-comments\-popup\.php|wp\-links\-opml\.php|wp\-locations\.php)") {
set $cache_uri "no cache";
}
# Don't use the cache for logged in users or recent commenters
if ($http_cookie ~* "comment_author|wordpress_[a-f0-9]+|wp\-postpass|wordpress_logged_in") {
set $cache_uri 'no cache';
}
# Use cached or actual file if they exists, otherwise pass request to WordPress
location / {
try_files /wp-content/w3tc/pgcache/$cache_uri/_index.html $uri $uri/ /index.php?q=$uri&$args;
}
# Cache static files for as long as possible
location ~* \.(xml|ogg|ogv|svg|svgz|eot|otf|woff|mp4|ttf|css|rss|atom|js|jpg|jpeg|gif|png|ico|zip|tgz|gz|rar|bz2|doc|xls|exe|ppt|tar|mid|midi|wav|bmp|rtf)$ {
try_files $uri =404;
expires max;
access_log off;
}
# Deny access to hidden files
location ~* /\.ht {
deny all;
access_log off;
log_not_found off;
}
# Pass PHP scripts on to PHP-FPM
location ~* \.php$ {
try_files $uri /index.php;
fastcgi_index index.php;
fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000;
include fastcgi_params;
fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
fastcgi_param SCRIPT_NAME $fastcgi_script_name;
}
}