I just got informed by MediaTemple that my GPUs are trending high. I have a vague idea what that means – basically that my site is using too many of MT’s gerbil wheels, and they are going to charge me a few cents if it goes over. They are projecting I’ll owe a grand total of 60 cents, so it’s not a huge deal. But I figured if I’m using that much power, it might be time to look at some optimization. A quick search led me to the wp-cache plugin, which I just installed.
From my relatively noob-like understanding, by default WordPress pages are rendered on the fly – grabbing the content out of a database and using PHP to assemble a readable HTML page whenever one is requested. And what wp-cache does is save those pages as static html so that the next time the same page is requested, it just hands off the HTML it rendered last time, not wasting all the time and energy to re-render it.
Now obviously, if you have a lot of dynamic content on the page, that’s not going to work, because you are going go get a cached page. I don’t think that’s going to be a big issue here, but I figured I’d post about it in case anyone sees any oddnesses. Please let me know if you see anything that doesn’t look right. Unfortunately, I cannot blame the plugin for my own typos, bad grammar, or made up words. 🙂
I’ve been thinking about trying that one out too. I’d be interested to hear if it causes any problems, and if it actually reduces your GPUs significantly. Also – you might want to look into wp-supercache (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-super-cache/). It’s under active development whereas wp-cache hasn’t been updated in over a year.
I’m a happy WP-Supercache user. It greatly reduces the time it takes to render pages. Especially on cheap hosts like mine, it helps a lot.
You can’t have an up-to-the-minute “most popular” list on your pages any more. But those are a resource hog anyway, so you’re better of without them.
Also comments might be a problem, but I’m using Disqus which hosts the comments offsite and inserts them via an Ajax call. There might be a few more problems, but the gains of caching largely outrank the drawbacks.
I recently turned on wp-super-cache on my blog, and moved my lightly trafficked blog from 89 cpu cycles down to 12 (per month). It does one heck of a job. Super Cache does a bit more static caching than regular wp-cache, but it is built on top of wp-cache, as far as I know.