Continuing with my WordCamp NYC talks review, I'd like to point out the notes I took attending the talk Caching and Optimization for WordPress, by Jeremy Clarke.

I believe this was a great topic to be covered for people who actively maintain WordPress installations and have to deal with upgrades, stability and reliability. However, I also think Jeremy took a much more basic approach for this topic the way it shouldn't have to be. He would describe all the tools that he was showcasing from the most basic parts of it, like what's a terminal or why you should use it, to an audience attending the advanced development track.

Anyway, here are my notes:

• Expect a lot of traffic for your websites.
• First point of review, slow database queries.
• Caching.
  • Serving already fetched data.
• WP Super Cache (mandatory cache plugin).
• WP Tuner (resources information).
• YSlow, Yahoo's Firebug plugin.
• If necessary, use Gravatar.
• Memcached for WordPress.
• "CLI: The DOS-style of using a computer". What a quote.
• htop, a much more intuitive top.
• apachetop, an Apache processes visualizer.
• MySQL Tuning Primer Script.
• Use either APC, memcached or XCache.
• Monit, triggering commands.

After the talk I prompted him to whether he would consider also moving away from Apache and trying much faster alternatives like FastCGI PHP on nginx or Cherokee. He mentioned that he had considered it, but he preferred to stick with the most conventional and commonly used software for his installations. That's his opinion, of course. On mine, based on my own experience, dropping Apache is usually one of the best ways to workaround most of the issues around a slow WordPress.

Now thanks to WordPress.tv, we have a video of the talk that Jeremy delivered on a previos event:

And his slides:

During last weekend's WordCamp, Jeremy Clarke gave a bunch of tips for websites server optimizations (I'll summarize my views on his talk later on a separate post) and he showcased a plugin for Firebug that I didn't know about and caught my attention: Yahoo! YSlow. It is a really nice piece of software, it adds a tab on your Firebug window and will grade the performance of the web page you are browsing with a set of tips on how to make it faster, ranging from images, CSS, JavaScript, headers, etc:

I find this to not be the ultimate solution to fix your websites' loading speed of course, but something advisable to use and try to comply against.

I believe it's time for me to get my blog from D to A