Insights about one of our recent projects mobilesport.ch

1. WordPress Zurich Meetup
Mobilesport.ch - Insights
02. Juni 2014

2. Table of contents
mobilesport.ch - Insights
 What is the idea of mobilesport.ch
 Main goals of the relaunch
 A few statistics
 Does „strong“ hardware make your WordPress faster?
 Nginx vs. Apache
 Site caching, AJAX and memcached
 Used plugins
 The WPML struggle is real
 Learnings

3. What is the idea of mobilesport.ch
mobilesport.ch - Insights
 Platform for sports trainers and teachers
 …And other people who are keen on sports
 Search and find exercises covering their needs
 Put exercises together on lists
 Re-use and share exercise lists with others
 And of course: Use the contents in their lessons or make
their own lessons to keep themselves fit

4. What is the idea of mobilesport.ch
mobilesport.ch - Insights

5. What is the idea of mobilesport.ch
mobilesport.ch - Insights

6. What is the idea of mobilesport.ch
mobilesport.ch - Insights

7. Main goals
mobilesport.ch - Insights
 1. Faster response times
 2. Easier to handle and filter sports exerices
 3. Refactor / modernize code base (our goal)

8. A few statistics
mobilesport.ch - Insights
 11‘950 posts
 4‘222 in german, 4‘171 in french, 3‘557 in italian
 191‘457 post meta data records
 1‘440 terms
 223‘578 term relationships
 1‘258 registered users
 2‘387 favorite lists
 33‘377 list items
 And this, combined with the WPML plugin is
essentially what made it slow.

9. Does „strong“ hardware make your WordPress faster?
mobilesport.ch - Insights

10. Does „strong“ hardware make your WordPress faster?
mobilesport.ch - Insights
 More CPU or RAM != Faster Request
 More CPU/RAM == More Request/sec
 More RAM == More possibilities to cache
How to make a single request faster?
 Fast basic installation (i.e. nginx/php5-fpm/hhvm)
 Write efficient code
 Cache as much as possible

11. nginx vs. apache2 - Installation
mobilesport.ch - Insights
Live Machine Test Machine
Installation Type Physical Server VPS / Amazon EC2
CPU 2x6 2.5 GHz Cores (Xeon) 1 vCPU (Xeon E5-2670)
RAM 8x8 GB (64GB total) 3.75 GB
Harddisks Native SSD EBS Network Storage
Webserver Apache 2.2.22 Nginx 1.4.1
PHP Installation mod_php5 / apache2handler php5-fpm
PHP Version PHP 5.4.x PHP 5.5.x
MySQL Version 5.5.37 5.5.37
Memcached 1.4.14 1.4.14

12. nginx vs. apache2 - Results
mobilesport.ch - Insights
Live Machine Test Machine
Uncached Request (HT Disabled) 1.1s – 1.3s Not tested
Uncached Request (HT Enabled) 700 – 800ms 400 – 500ms
WordPress Ajax Request 200 – 350ms 100 – 200ms
Cached Request (HTML Cache) 30 – 60ms 20 – 50ms
Cached Requests/sec - simple siege ~2500 Req/s ~180 Req/s
Cached Requests/sec – CPU Usage 10-15% 20-30%
Uncached Requests/sec - simple siege ~50 Req/s ~20 Req/s
Uncached Requests/sec – CPU Usage 30-35% +100%

13. Site caching, AJAX, memcached
mobilesport.ch - Insights
What makes the new mobilesport.ch faster?
 Site caching (Serving cached sites from wp-config.php)
 Using AJAX for dynamic content
 Don‘t load certain modules while DOING_AJAX
 Cache complex business logic (wp_cache_*)
 Cache complex DB queries
 Use memcached as WP_Object_Cache

14. Plugins
mobilesport.ch - Insights
Which plugins did we use?
 Antispam Bee
 Contact Form 7
 Google XML Sitemaps
 Installer (Especially for WPML)
 JWPlayer 6 Plugin
 TinyMCE Advanced
 WPML
 wpSEO

15. The WPML struggle is real
mobilesport.ch - Insights
Maybe you have seen tweets like these:

16. The WPML struggle is real
mobilesport.ch - Insights
What were the problems
 Various bugs with memcached
 Looks like WPML is not actually tested for persistent caching
 Proper cache invalidation missing
 Very slow support
 Support answers quite fast, but…
 Solutions are developed slowly (or not at all)
 New (major) bugs with every update
 We are live, but there are still unfixed bugs
 Memcached is „completely disabled“ in backend
 Features like bulk editing removed

17. The WPML struggle is real
mobilesport.ch - Insights
What were the problems
 Various bugs with memcached
 Looks like WPML is not actually tested for persistent caching
 Proper cache invalidation missing
 Very slow support
 Support answers quite fast, but…
 Solutions are developed slowly (or not at all)
 New (major) bugs with every update
 We are live, but there are still unfixed bugs
 Memcached is „completely disabled“ in backend
 Features like bulk editing removed

18. Learnings
mobilesport.ch - Insights
 We‘re not going to use WPML anymore
 Hint: We migrated every project to our own ML solution
 Mobilesport.ch is our last project where we use WPML
 When using memcached
 …Make sure you have enough RAM allocated
 …Make sure that all plugins work properly
 If possible, use nginx/php5-fpm configurations
 You might want to try hhvm instead of php5-fpm
 Refactoring a whole code base needs a lot of analysis
 Updating WordPress or a plugin can cause serious issues

19. Michael Sebel
Software-Engineer
Twitter: @msebel
michael.sebel@blogwerk.com
Questions and contact
mobilesport.ch - Insights