favicon.ico files and WordPress

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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President’s Day 2009 holiday hours

Our business offices will be closed on Monday, February 16 to observe the US legal holiday. As always, we’ll provide same-day support for time-sensitive issues via our ticket and e-mail systems. However, questions that aren’t time-sensitive (including most billing matters) may not be answered until the next day, and telephone support (via callbacks) will be available only for urgent problems.

And Happy Birthday to Charles Darwin, too!

Change in secure SSL ciphers

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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