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caching

Why WP Rocket fails on high traffic sites and how to fix it

Why WP Rocket fails on high traffic sites and how to fix it

We are big users of WP Rocket (licensed through 2020). WP Rocket works great on our clients' normal busy sites (up to 5 million visitors/month). We run one very high traffic network with up to 40 million visitors in one week or even a million visitors/hour.

On this site, WP Rocket fails miserably. When new articles are posted WP Rocket purges the cache of too many different pages:

  • all the category archives to which the page belongs
  • related date archives
  • even the previous post and previous post in the same category (this is to keep the prev/next links on the posts working, if the post is updated it clears the next post too)
  • feeds
  • and of course the homepage

And all of the above happens if a post is added, updated or a comment is posted. So when you have people writing new comments every second you end up with a lot of cache purges on the pages where the information about new comment is not so important - new comments should only purge that post cache and nothing else.

Keep reading Why WP Rocket fails on high traffic sites and how to fix it

WordPress Caching Drag Race: Hyper Cache vs. WP Rocket

WordPress Caching Drag Race: Hyper Cache vs. WP Rocket

We love Satollo and loved Hyper Cache (we're longtime paid users and supporters of his Newsletter technology as well). Strangely, sometimes good developers do bad work. The latest version of Hyper Cache (version 3) is a prime example of what can go wrong with rewrite upgrades.

Since we were struggling with Hyper Cache we decided to take a look at WP Rocket who is the hot new caching kid on the WordPress block. Sadly WP Rocket is not a good replacement for us for now. We test and compare Hyper Cache and WP Rocket below.

Keep reading WordPress Caching Drag Race: Hyper Cache vs. WP Rocket

Why WPEngine caching doesn’t work with eCommerce sites

Why WPEngine caching doesn’t work with eCommerce sites

... and what can be done about it

Many successful WordPress site owners have moved their sites over to WPEngine for their high performance and high speed even under very heavy traffic.

WP Engine is able to provide this kind of speed thanks to their "hand-built a WordPress-specific EverCache system" and "a fully-managed CDN service" (for more info see WP Engine's articles on speed and infrastructure).

Keep reading Why WPEngine caching doesn't work with eCommerce sites

WordPress Speed Test 2012: WP Super Cache vs HyperCache

WordPress cache plugins were in really sad shape by the summer of 2012. WordPress 3.3 and WordPress 3.4 have changed some important parts of these plugins and they started to collapse. The first one to go was W3 Total Cache (at WordPress.org) which has been getting about 50% broken ratings since last fall. After spending months learning how to use W3 Total Cache just right (it's a complicated beast), we had to pull it off all our sites. Fortunately the much simpler WP Super Cache (at WordPress.org) remained bullet proof.

This spring and summer WP Super Cache broke too. Garbage collection does not work reliably any more, leading to people getting served week old pages. Donncha first suggested it's impossible to make WP Super Cache work for all hosting out of the box. Strange as for more than five years WP Super Cache did just that. The real answer came a bit later. WP Super Cache is a free plugin and Donncha just doesn't have time anymore.

I have hardly any time to devote to this any more. One of the dangers of becoming a father I'm afraid.

We've struggled to get garbage collection working properly to keep our clients' sites cached but reliably up to date. For the moment garbage collection still won't run reliably on at least Informed Comment. As JuanCole.com is one of the most read political sites in the world, this is something which needed to be fixed right away. It turns out there is a third WordPress cache plugin out there, Hyper Cache (at WordPress.org). We know the author of this plugin Stefano Lissa from his Newsletter Pro plugin which we use for a few clients. Lissa's code is good, he can handle sophisticated tasks while keeping the code structured enough for external teams to find and repair bugs and he answers his email.

So while HyperCache is less well-known than the big two, it seemed worth a try. We think long and hard before changing horses on core functionality like caching as we have years of experience with our core plugins. Usually our philosophy is better the devil you know is better than the one you don't.

In addition, WP Super Cache has mod_rewrite capability which means no PHP has to run (and hence presumably no CPU) to serve cached pages. We put a high value on Super Cache's capability to bypass PHP processing. But to our surprise testing last year had shown to Hyper Cache to be a bit faster than WP Super Cache. Other testing had shown Hyper Cache competitive. What is also worth noting from the other two tests is that in a comparable environment W3 Total Cache is in no way superior to either WP Super Cache and Hyper Cache, just more complicated. Complicated is bad: KISS is the best development rule ever written.

We still didn't really believe these results and thought there must be something strange in the test environment. We wanted to test against a real site and a real server that had been online.

We still had a testbed server available with Informed Comment on it and no traffic. The nice thing about this test bed is that it is a very limited 768 MB VPS with bare bones Apache and mod_php on it. I.e. we knew that if we gave it a good effort we'd be able to saturate it with proper external testing from LoadImpact. Our main dedicated servers with nginx would cost hundreds of dollars per test instead of $15/test. Based on past testing, we far prefer real web traffic than synthetic benchmarks like ApacheBench.

Here's what we found with 500 concurrent connection test. First the results for WP Super Cache.

Now from the challenger HyperCache.

Basically the results are identical. Both plugins allow the post to be downloaded at a fairly constant 1.8 seconds per load.

Keep reading WordPress Speed Test 2012: WP Super Cache vs HyperCache

Ten steps to build a great mobile version of your website

As mobile devices get better, more visitors are using smart phones to surf. Here's a step by step guide to quickly create a great mobile site.

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