Zoom… Zoom…

Our page load has been too slow, not because the server couldn’t push through the page requests fast enough (12 CPUs), or we didn’t have enough memory (96GB), but because the database is so large, and our website so active that we would get bogged down with tables in the database locking out other database requests as they tried to complete the ones they already had… causing unseemly delays in rendering of pages. We were already using WP Super Cache but it was not able to assist with the database requests. We tried out a paid alternative in WP-Rocket, because I’ve always heard that W3 Total Cache is too difficult to setup. So I went with an easy to setup alternative. While it does setup easily, it also, failed to deliver any benefit to the database and the server actually ran at a higher load, though once cached, pages loaded fine.

In discussion with tech support for our hosting, we decided that memcache should be installed on the server and to take advantage of it, I needed to put on my “web developer” pants and install W3 Total Cache. Long story short… 1 hour after turning W3 Total Cache on the server load has returned to more normal levels, and the pages are rendering quickly once again (and even quicker once cached).

Thanks guys… awesome plugin!

And no, it’s not that difficult to setup…