Presentation given to WordCamp Buffalo 2016

1. PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT
Alan Lok

2. WHY SHOULD I CARE?
• Save money?
• Look better?
• Keep clients!

3. COMPUTER PERFORMANCE
Computer performance is characterized by the amount of work accomplished by a computer system
or computer network compared to the time and resources used. Depending on the context, high
computer performance may involve one or more of the following:
• Short response time for a given piece of work
• High throughput (rate of processing work)
• Low utilization of computing resource(s)
• High availability of the computing system or application
• Fast (or highly compact) data compression and decompression
• High bandwidth
• Short data transmission time
As defined by Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_performance

4. HOW DOES ONE MANAGE
PERFORMANCE
Monitor
after release
Monitor
before release
Monitor
before your
client calls you

5. MONITOR BEFORE RELEASE
• PHP profiling (for plugin and theme developers)
• Database analysis (for plugin developers)
• Load testing

6. PHP PROFILING
• Analyze your application with a PHP profiler such
as BlackFire.io, New Relic, or xdebug/cachegrind
• Look for high number of calls, especially
apply_filters, mysql calls, and wp_cache_get

7. PAGE PROFILING
• Page weight
• CSS weight
• JS execution

10. DATA ACCESS
• Use a tool such as New Relic to look through
number of calls to database
• Optimize calls when rolling out your own table
structures and ensure there are proper indexes
• Reduce number of plugins, widgets and
shortcodes can cut down on database access

11. LOADTESTING
• wrk (https://github.com/wg/wrk)
• Siege (https://www.joedog.org/siege-home/)
• http_load (http://acme.com/software/http_load/)
The simple ones

12. BUT WAIT,WHAT ABOUT
WEBDRIVER…
• Great tool for real world and/or transactional
testing
• Need lots of computing power
• Harder to script

13. IT’S LIVE!
Monitor
your server
Monitor
your users
Monitor
your app

14. BEATYOUR CLIENTTO
RESOLUTION
• Set up application-based alerts via New Relic
• Set up server monitoring via DataDog or New
Relic
• Set up 3rd party monitoring (New Relic, Pingdom)

15. PRODUCTION METRICS
• Response times / latency
Specifically for dynamic content serving
• Error rate
For both server and client
• Process availability
Is my Apache, Nginx, PHP-FPM, MySQL or
memcached up?
• Number of connections
Every machine has its limits, play within it
• Memory utilization
You do not want to use swap
• Database QPS
that actually matter

17. BEST WAYTO AVOID
DOWNTIME IS…
add redundancy
add redundancy
test your redundancy

18. SOME CHEAP WAYSTO SPEED
UPYOUR WORDPRESS SITE
• Google mod_pagespeed
• Varnish
• W3TC or WP SuperCache
• fewer plugins
Caveat: not a one size fits all solution, so test and measure

19. Prevention is the best kind of
performance management
me

20. @alan_lok
Thanks!