Devit!

Whenever your browsing the web I’m sure you’ve run into many websites that have horrible loading times. If your sites are slow this can impact your customers and your business.

Here’s some helpful hints to get you headed in the right direction:

1) Host any dynamic website on apache whenever possible - it will run fast and handle heavy loads with ease
2) Use tools like YSlow from Yahoo! to get suggested speed fixes on all your sites.
3) Build caching into your custom web sites and utilize caching in any existing frameworks when provided.
4) Take the time and energy to go through both your apache httpd.conf and your php.ini (if applicable) and verify you only have necessary features enabled. Adding extra bloat to your server will slow it down - and make handling heavy amounts of traffic more difficult.
5) Monitor your log files for software bugs and when you’re content with a running site - disable all non-critical logging as the server error logging can cause some delays.
6) Use the built in apache benchmarking tool called ab - you can’t go wrong with this tool.
7) Get in touch with a Professional for some additional tweaks, testing and benchmarking. Typically a small investment can leverage large gains in performance.

Starting with the suggestions above you should be well on your way to reducing your page response times by at least 50%.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 29th, 2008 at 11:04 am and is filed under Devit!, ITster!. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.