Optimizing WordPress Performance: KuwaitPaperDump Gets a Boost

Updated on May 20th: Benchmark results!

The awesome guys at KuwaitPaperDump (KPD) have been doing a great effort into reducing paper usage and providing almost all kinds of brochures and leaflets online.

For such great efforts, I felt obliged to help them gain even the tiniest performance boost possible. And they did!

WordPress introduced a set of options since 2.6 that would help take advantage of some features of the HTTP protocol: A protocol that all websites and browsers speak and communicate with.

Currently, KPD have taken one of several steps into boosting the performance. The next steps require some coding and some ritual dancing. Hopefully we'll get those done and invite everyone for the paperless party soon ;D

I've already created a presentation for KPD to simplify the concept and ideas, so rather than rewriting, I'll link to that presentation and just summarize things in here for reference.

Optimization tricks:

• Load files in parallel
• Separate the static content from the dynamic one
• Enable GZIP on the server, not WordPress
• Serve files from a geographically closer location

The last point is possible to achieve  with mirroring the content between 2 servers and create a failover scenario using free Dynamic DNS services.

You may want to check back here in a week or two, because we'll try to benchmark before and after each enhancement to know how much performance gain we're getting.

Benchmarks:

• Before using a subdomain to point at same server: 16 seconds to full page load
• After (on Mac): 10.6 seconds (33.75% performance boost)
• After (on Linux): 8.9 seconds (55.6% performance boost)

There will be more benchmarks as PaperDump goes for extra enhancements, so stay tuned!

The presentation can be found here. (browser and mobile friendly!)

GMail Acting Up

A couple of friends have told me that when they sign in to their gmail account, they get other people's inbox! Hitting refresh, shows yet another inbox.

The good news is that whenever clicking on an email message, or a label, or a directory, the session expires and you get logged off.

The bad news is that people can see emails in your inbox and can see the emails of those who sent you the emails.

I searched around and so far, no one has reported this!

K.The Kuwaiti had reported this issue here.

The problem seems to be facing those using FastTelco ISP connection, both home & businesses. Seems like they're using transparent proxies & caching data.
I confirmed it with those who told me about these symptoms, and they were using FT connections.

As for the post at 248AM blog, I don't agree with the suggestions in that post and have posted a correction.

Here's my my take at the issue:

"Tor was abused and embassy information was stolen through it. The same goes for proxies. They're simply someone else's machine.

By the way, even when an ISP is using a cache or a transparent proxy, it should NOT cache SSL (encrypted) pages. It can't. Simply because the session exists between the user (you) and the server (gmail, for example) and the cache server has nothing to see.

Try accessing GMail using this link: https://mail.google.com instead of using gmail.com -- This will work because gmail.com will only use SSL to authenticate then redirect you to your inbox using HTTP, where if you use https://mail.google.com, it will keep the SSL session and log you to your inbox with an encrypted channel.

The same applies for banking sites using SSL."

Update: Tuesday, Feb 19^th: According to those who were facing the problems, they have stopped now.