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http-speed: php fpm multiple version, varnish

Martin_Sauer

Regular Pleskian
situation:
Plesk offers a nice wordpress package. Yet wordpress - especially when plugin and theme-heavy - has huge php-load-time issues. Major part is the constant reload of the php-environment as cgi or fcgi-implementations. Cgi and fcgi-implementations also almost nullify any gains by caches (except in the rare cases where consequent hits occur within a few seconds).

solution:
1. Deployment of php-fpm for every php handler (not just 1). E.g. on my WP-sites, this is a difference of 1.8 seconds on initial index.php (without fpm) to 0.80 seconds (with fpm). Count in ZendOpCache and APCu and I end up (tested) at 0.25 seconds and less on initial page load.
2. Make the vhost php--environment keep-alive configurable (longer stay alive). This way the caches stay active for prolonged times, thus reducing load times drastically.
2. Enable php-fpm for both apache and nginx. Especially for WP apache is "easier" to use. nginx can be extremely tricky - even more though, when deploying full security functionality (which mostly uses .htaccess resp. httpd.conf)
3. Enable deployment of varnish. Varnish is tricky in WP environments due to cookies. Then again varnish could drastically improve speed once more (especially coupled with eg. W3 Total Cache).

Basically the whole package above on a professionally site (fully featured, another test site of mine) changes load times drastically:
2.7 - 6 seconds load time on initial load without above optimization (tested from a server nearby) to
0.5 -1.4 seconds fully optimized.

Thatll be a damn HUGE gain in performance.
 
Last edited:
Actually we have plans for implementing all of these features in one of the next Plesk releases except varnish. Varnish is out of scope, sorry.
 
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