High Performance WordPress – Part 4

Alrighty folks, if you’ve been following along with the High Performance WordPress post series you will by now have experienced the awesomeness of a WordPress website running on nginx. If you’ve not been following along what are you waiting for? Go check out the following posts first:

  • Part 1 – VPS Setup
  • Part 2 – nginx/mysql setup
  • Part 3 – WordPress setup & tuning on nginx

Today we’re going to sqeeze even more performance out of your trusty little VPS by configuring and tuning an opcode cache for php.

What is an Opcode cache?

PHP differs from languages like Java and the .net framework in that it is an interpreted language meaning that each time you call a PHP script, the server must first read the contents of the script and compile the logic contained within to code that the operating system can understand (which is the Opcode bit). This is all fine and dandy if you’re running a low volume website with very simple non-memory intensive application logic. As soon as you start to use more complex PHP applications like WordPress and then throw in a bit of traffic things tend to get slower – quickly. A lot slower in fact.

All this “just in time” opcode compilation puts a lot of strain on your server in the form of memory usage.

Enter Opcode Cache

When setup correctly (and correct setup is key) an Opcode Cache can significantly speed things up nicely. In a nutshell an Opcode Cache will load, parse and compile your PHP requests once and load them into memory (or disk) for reuse. The advantages to this should be immediately obvious – your server will not need to process load, parse and compile the same PHP requests every single time they are called – saving precious RAM and CPU cycles – which can translate to significant page load speed improvements.

Common PHP Opcode Cache Options

With PHP becoming ever more popular over the past few years, lots of different Opcode caching options have emerged. Here are links to some of the more predominant options:

Which Opcode Cache is best?

I’ve played with all 3 of these extensively and I always come back to APC. APC will at some point come out of the box with future PHP releases. It was also the Opcode cache of choice for frickin Facebook for a long time. (Although I think Facebook now uses Hiphop exclusively which also comes with an implementation of APC).  You’ll see lots of debate about which one is best but APC is just dandy in my book and generally works really really well so let’s get on with the setup and configuration process.

APC Setup and Configuration

If you’ve been following along with our High Performance WordPress post series, the really good news is that I snuck in the APC installation back in Part 2. If you’ve not been following along – shame on you! The install process is still pretty straightforward:

[sourcecode]
apt-get install php-apc
service php5-fpm restart
[/sourcecode]

To check and see if you’re already running APC, load your trusty phpinfo page and look for this:

APC Tuning

Sometimes just installing APC is “good enough” to get you up and running but you really should tune it for your specific website to avoid degrading your websites performance. Thankfully APC has a nice little script which helps us see what it is doing and in turns helps tune APC accordingly.

Log on to your shell account and grab a copy of the APC diagnostic script and drop it into your web root as follows:

[sourcecode]
cp /usr/share/doc/php-apc/apc.php.gz /srv/www/mydomain.com/public_html/
cd /srv/www/mydomain.com/public_html
gzip -d apc.php.gz
[/sourcecode]

Go ahead and open apc.php (use nano apc.php) which should now be in your web root and set a strong password to enable the script. Then open mydomain.com/apc.php and you should see some lovely data like this:

Right now most of this will mean diddly squat – that’s ok! There are a few really really important things you need to fully understand to get the true benefits of APC.

  • Memory (apc.shm_size) Size – The single most important thing to understand about how APC works. In a nutshell, APC will store your compiled PHP to RAM (or mmap memory most likely on most distros now). The default size of the memory block allocated to APC is 32 MB. I find this generally to be too low for your typical WordPress website. I generally bump this up to 96M or even 128M to start with. You might be ok with 32M but I wouldn’t risk it – especially if you have a bit of memory to spare. On my trusty 512M Linode I have allocated 128M to APC alone without any issues. Why is apc.shm_size so important? Well, if you leave it at the default 32M and the cache is filled quickly, it will most likely hit 100% memory usage in a very short space of time, at which point APC will dump the complete contents of the cache! When this happens all new incoming PHP requests will be re-compiled by APC and this will cause a memory spike in itself on your server. Moreover, if you’re constantly hitting high percentiles of APC memory usage it is likely your cache will become quite fragmented which will cause a bit of a performance degradation. If after a week or two you find at you’re never using more than 50% of your memory allocation you can always dial it back down. Just remember that if you add another new and separate WordPress install to your server you’ll need to bump it back up again. I generally assign 56M per site on my servers to be safe.
  • Cache Hits & Misses – When a PHP request is served from your APC cache this is a HIT. When the PHP request must be loaded, parsed and compiled by PHP this is a MISS. When you first install APC and load your first few WordPress requests you will have more misses than hits – naturally as APC has never seen them before. But after a few more requests you’ll find your hits should start rising dramatically. Over time (after a day or two) virtually all PHP requests should be hits. For a typical stable WordPress website where you’re not chopping and change plugins, themes frequently, you should be getting high 90%’s for your hit ratio.

Once you understand these 2 fundamentals everything else after should be pretty straight forward. There is a lot of other fine tuning you can do to your APC install but your cache size and your hit ratio will be the main determinants of how effective APC is for your server.

I’ve included my typical APC config below. This config is used on a few nginx/php-fpm servers I’ve built out in the past couple of years that serve thousands of visitors per day with very healthy high 90%’s hit ratios and memory usage under 60% consistently.

To edit your APC config:

[sourcecode]
cd /etc/php5/conf.d/
nano apc.ini

extension=apc.so
apc.enabled = 1
apc.shm_segments = 1
apc.shm_size = 96
apc.optimization = 0
apc.num_files_hint = 4096
apc.ttl = 7200
apc.user_ttl = 7200
apc.gc_ttl = 0
apc.cache_by_default = 1
apc.filters = ""
apc.mmap_file_mask = "/tmp/apc.XXXXXX"
apc.slam_defense = 0
apc.file_update_protection = 2
apc.enable_cli = 0
apc.max_file_size = 10M
apc.stat = 1
apc.write_lock = 1
apc.report_autofilter = 0
apc.include_once_override = 0
;apc.rfc1867 = 0
;apc.rfc1867_prefix = "upload_"
;apc.rfc1867_name = "APC_UPLOAD_PROGRESS"
;apc.rfc1867_freq = 0
apc.localcache = 0
apc.localcache.size = 512
apc.coredump_unmap = 0
apc.stat_ctime = 0
[/sourcecode]

If you’re interested in what each of these values is for look no further than the main APC Runtime configuration docs.

That’s is for Part 4! In Part 5, we’ll be adding the final big layer or super charging for your server when we walk you through the process of setting up a Varnish Cache server to sit in front of nginx. Part 6 will then bring everything together when I walk you through our testing tools of choice for benchmarking server performance.

In the meantime your homework for this week (I would have loved if they taught this shit in school!) should be to tune your APC run time configuration for optimal memory assignment.

See you next week!

Ed


Comments

20 responses to “High Performance WordPress – Part 4”

  1. Thank you very much for part 4 guide Ed! But i have a question for you , with your w3 total cache settings w3 total cache plugin giving me “Disk enhanced page caching is not active. To enable it, add the following rules into the server configuration file” error in its setting page. is this normal?

    1. you are most welcome!

      I’ve seen this a few times before – with apache it will happen if it can’t write to your .htaccess file. Obviously with nginx .htaccess files are redundant and nginx relies completely on your config files for rewriting rules.

      The problem is that W3TC can’t read your config rules directly when they are stored outside the web root (which they are in our guide) therefore this ‘error’ is generally a false positive and can be ignored.

      To be absolutely sure that enhanced page caching is working navigate via the shell to your /public_html/wp-content/w3tc/pgcache directory and ensure there are files being written to it.

      If not you need to double back and make sure that your permissions are set correctly (see chown in Part 3) as your error is more likely a permissions error if nothing is being written to this directory.

      NOTE: W3TC will not write anything to this folder while you are logged into WordPress so logout or browse your site with a different browser that isn’t logged into WordPress.

      Hope this helps,

      Ed

  2. Ok but i am using the latest version which is 0.9.2.4 also supports nginx. For example the error it says “Disk enhanced page caching is not active. To enable it, add the following rules into the server configuration file (/domain.com/publich_html/nginx.conf) which is weird i think =) also what is the purpose of not writing anything when user is logged in? so only the visitors will benefit from the cached content while the logged in users not. so logged in users will load the pages slow. am i missing the point in here? thanks.

    1. Hey Burçe – by default W3TC does not cache pages for logged in users which is a good thing as if you’re making changes to your site you get to see them straight away rather than having to clear the main cache.
      You can change this if you want under the Page Cache settings. W3TC has supported nginx for quite a while but I’ve had reliable results using the nginx.conf provided by W3TC itself and have had much better results with the rule I’ve provided in this guide. The rules for provided by W3TC are not as efficient and have lots of if statements in them if I remember correctly (it’s been a while since I took a look). I don’t know if the plugin actually checks for the presence of a nginx.conf in your web root (which is prob why you’re seeing the error) but if it is it really shouldn’t as most people who use nginx don’t store their conf rules in the web root. I know for apache land it does check for a .htaccess in the web root – but that makes sense given it’s the right place for it.

      Some people have adjusted their nginx conf to pick up the conf file in the web root (see here http://wordpress.org/support/topic/plugin-w3-total-cache-nginx-url-rewriting-warning) but again you’ll notice people saying it hasn’t worked well.

  3. Ahh forgot to ask ; also now, after setting apc can i use it for page caching ?

    1. Yes you can but to be honest you’ll need a lot more RAM than 512MB to see the benefits. My experience in setting Page Caching to use APC from W3TC on 512MB was not good. Memory use shot through the roof as the APC cache filled up instantly. You’ll need 2GB of RAM min. I think before thinking about switching Page Caching to use APC. For smaller VPS’s and shared hosts you’ll get much better results using enhanced Page Caching.

  4. Thank you very much Ed, got the point now. Btw can you please share your mysql conf and php5-fpm conf for your 512 linode vps? Thanks.

    1. Hey Burçe I forgot about my mysql conf! I’ll include that and my fpm config later next week.

      Ed

  5. Thanks Ed! By the way i am little bit confused. If this is a guide based on a 512mb vps config, why you show us to install and configure APC if it is not a good idea to use APC with page caching? So why we installed and configured APC right now ? =D I am sure i am missing something =)

    1. Hey Burçe, with APC installed and enabled it will precompile the WordPress php opcode by default. (this is different than the actual output [html 1=”js” language=”,css,”][/html] of your website)

      You don’t need to be selecting to use APC to store the full page cache aswell. There is a big difference between the two. In fact, Frederick (W3TC developer) generally recommends enhanced page caching on the file system as being the optimal method to use for page caching (see http://wordpress.org/support/topic/plugin-w3-total-cache-for-page-caching-which-is-better-apc-or-disk).

      When you select APC as your cache store for page caching it’s actually going to store the full page cache in APC memory which is an expensive use of your RAM. It also means PHP is hit for every single request rather than letting nginx serve the files from the file system when using either of the file system cache options. In most cases for smaller VPS’s and shared hosts this is far more preferable to using APC as your W3TC page cache. For larger VPS’s with a lot more memory APC may be better. That’s been my experience anyway!

  6. Thank you for the info Ed! Is there an ETA for the part 5?

    1. Hey Burçe – sorry about the long gap between part 4 and 5 – it’s been a busy few months – Part 5 will be out within the week.

      Ed

  7. Hey Ed, these are great, really high quality blog posts. I was wondering if you were going to post part 5 any time soon? I’m hanging out for it 🙂

    1. Hey Matt,

      Thanks for the kind comments.

      I’ve had a hectic couple of months which are now starting to settle thankfully – Part 5 should be out in the next week.

      Ed

  8. Lol I love this, can’t wait for P.5

  9. Wow. Excellent tutorial Ed!!

    I had basically no Linux knowledge and now I have a Linode VPS running Nginx + PHP5 + WordPress. Totally Awesome!

    I’ve followed trough all the steps and it works great! Along with the tutorial I’ve used other resources (like “linux shell basic commands”, as I was a total n00b), this was my main guide.

    Thank you a lot and congrats for your great site. Looking forward for new posts.

    1. delighted to hear you got everything setup Bruno 🙂 I’m yet again delayed releasing the final few parts of the guide but up to Part 4 gives you a really solid setup.

  10. Great guide Ed! Incredible information here…we are running Amazon AWS EC2 CentOS (LEMP) with RDS.

    Super excited to see how Varnish Cache is implemented in Part 5.

    Thanks again Ed!

  11. What’s happened to part 3? I’m getting a 404 error page when I go to http://themesforge.com/featured/high-performance-wordpress-part-3/

    Very frustrating as I was just getting my teeth into part 2 & looking forward to the next one!

    1. Hey Simon,

      Sorry about the delayed response – playing catch up on comments from the past while 🙂 Part 3 was fixed a few days ago – I think you pinged me via twitter 🙂

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