Apparently someone thinks that my website is too slow in its load time. I never really thought it was that bad, but his little handy danty Firefox plugin claims that it takes my site approximately 6-7 seconds to load initially, which kinda sucks. I know that I’ve written some stuff on optimizing php performance and I tell customers on a daily basis how to keep their sites from bogging down our servers, but I never really cared to optimize my own site because I have a v-dedicated server. So anyways, I’ve made a few modifications to both my site and the server environment to help speed things up a bit.

You might want to read my article on Optimizing PHP as well.

Enable Compression with Apache

If you are running on Apache 2, mod_deflate should already be installed on your system — all you have to do is enable it. I recently downgraded my server back to Apache 1.3.37 (mainly because of cPanel) so I’m using the mod_gzip alternative. Basically, mod_gzip compresses the contents of your site server-side and then passes the file onto your compression-enabled browser to decompress the file. The overhead on the server may be slightly higher during heavier traffic times, but you’ll find yourself saving bandwidth and load time since the server is passing less data between it and your clients.

To install mod_gzip on Apache:

wget http://easynews.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/mod-gzip/mod_gzip-1.3.26.1a.tgz
tar -zxvf mod_gzip-1.3.26.1a.tgz
cd mod_gzip-1.3.26.1a


If you’re on a cPanel system, you’ll need to modify the path to apxs:

pico Makefile

Change APXS?=/usr/local/sbin/apxs to APXS?=/usr/local/apache/bin/apxs

Then just do the normal make && make install

Now enable the dynamic modules in the Apache config:

pico /usr/local/apache/conf/httpd.conf

Uncomment out these lines:

#LoadModule gzip_module libexec/mod_gzip.so
#AddModule mod_gzip.c

Now all you need to do is restart Apache as normal. To see if compression is working on your site, just hop on over to this page and run the test.

Change The KeepAliveTimeout

By default your Apache configuration will probably have keep connections alive for up to 15 seconds before they die off. For busier sites this can be a little too long. I suggest setting this to 3 or 5 seconds in your httpd.conf.

Adjust the PHP Output Handler

Your PHP scripts are constantly recompiiling themselves every time a page is loaded. If your site is heavily reliant on PHP, you may find it beneficial to have PHP send its output to a compression function in your php.ini

output_handler = ob_gzhandler

Check Your resolv.conf

It’s obvious that your settings are fine if your site and email are working, but your resolver may not be set to do the fastest lookups. If you have a caching or local nameserver, you will want that listed first in /etc/resolve.conf . I’ve seen a drastic decrease in performance on some customer VPS’s because the servers were doing DNS lookups through external nameservers. I have dedicated nameservers, so my resolve.conf looks like this:

search v-nessa.net
nameserver 205.134.252.71
nameserver 4.2.2.1
nameserver 4.2.2.3

Optimize!

One of the major changes I made on my site was to the image and page sizes… I did a lot of code and image compression to decrease the amount of time it takes to load my site. A majority of this consisted of simply saving my images in .gif or .png formats and removing plugins and includes that were not needed.

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