We host some pretty high-volume WordPress sites, and one of the questions that occasionally comes up is “How can I make WordPress faster?”. That’s really just another way of saying “What part of my WordPress site is slow?”, which translates to “What requests are using a lot of CPU time?”
This question is surprisingly difficult to answer, particularly because we encourage customers who run busy WordPress sites to use FastCGI and caching. A single FastCGI process can handle lots of different PHP requests, so it’s hard to break down which individual request used what amount of server resources.
To solve this problem, we recently patched our version of PHP to optionally log the CPU time used by each request, even under FastCGI, so we could see what was really happening (patch available here).
What we found was unexpected. On some busy WordPress sites, 20–30% of the CPU time was being used to handle requests for “favicon.ico”. What the deuce?!
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We’ve made a technical change to the way our servers handle SSL connections (we’ve disabled 40 bit and 56 encryption ciphers). The change shouldn’t affect anyone, but we’re describing it here just for the record.
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We’ve updated our servers with a Perl security bug fix and a Ruby security update.
The updates fix only security bugs, and customers should not notice any changes in how the Perl or Ruby programming languages work.
Between 10:30 PM and 11:59 PM Pacific time this Saturday night (December 6), all Tiger Technologies servers will be restarted. As a result, customer Web sites and e-mail service will be unavailable for about five minutes at some point during this period.
No e-mail will be lost, of course; incoming mail will just be delayed for a few minutes.
This brief maintenance is necessary to upgrade the operating system “Linux kernel” to a newer version for security reasons. We apologize for the inconvenience this causes.
Update: the maintenance was completed with less than five minutes of downtime.
We’ve updated the Perl programming language on our servers with a security update.
The update only fixes one security bug, and customers should not notice any changes in how Perl works.
We’ve enhanced our e-mail service with support for manual “reject” and “allow” lists.
The reject list lets you add individual e-mail addresses, entire domains or IP addresses from which incoming e-mail should always be rejected. The allow list lets you add senders from which e-mail should always be accepted.
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We’ve upgraded our Apache Web server and MySQL database server software to cover recent minor security updates. Customers should not notice any changes.
In the past few months, we’ve made a couple of behind-the-scenes improvements to our mail systems that have improved reliability for our customers.
- Redundant outgoing mail delivery
- Automatic accepting of replies
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We’ve installed a PHP 5 security update. Customers should not notice any changes; the updates just fix several security issues in PHP 5.
We’ve updated rsync to version 3 on our servers. (We’re using Debian version 3.0.3-2, which includes patches from rsync 3.0.4.)
Rsync 3 is significantly faster than previous versions for recursive file transfers (which we use in our backup system). However, the new version is backward compatible with rsync 2.x, so users shouldn’t notice any changes or problems, even if you haven’t updated your own copy of rsync.
