Elliott C. Back: Internet & Technology

If you’ve thought about whether upgrading from WP Cache 2.0 to WP Super Cache is a good idea, hopefully this benchmark will convince you. I followed my instructions on benchmarking Wordpress with Apache Bench on four configurations of this blog’s main page to measure performance:

1. Without any caching plugins
2. With WP Cache 2.0
3. With WP Super Cache (no compression)
4. With WP Super Cache (compression enabled)

The results show that WP Super Cache is a clear winner, performing 225% better than the older WP Cache. Here is the raw data I gathered during the test:

No caching:
Requests per second: 22.81 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 4383.559 [ms] (mean)
Time per request: 43.836 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate: 613.75 [Kbytes/sec] received

WP cache:
Requests per second: 872.30 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 114.640 [ms] (mean)
Time per request: 1.146 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate: 23549.46 [Kbytes/sec] received

Super cache (no compression):
Requests per second: 1518.90 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 65.837 [ms] (mean)
Time per request: 0.658 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate: 41150.81 [Kbytes/sec] received

Super cache (compression):
Requests per second: 1960.39 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 51.010 [ms] (mean)
Time per request: 0.510 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate: 53108.70 [Kbytes/sec] received

For more tips on how to improve your Wordpress performance, check out Wordpress Performance: Why My Site Is So Much Faster Than Yours. Another interesting WP caching plugin is Batcache, which uses the memcached backend to serve requests out of a cluster of machines’ RAM memory.

I got a lovely email just now threatening me for being a notorious spammer:

Your doing it to drive up your Google Rank is pitiful, though I’ve informed Google of your attempts to game their system. Further evidence of scraping will be dealt with through the legal system. Perhaps a note to [your employer] will be of use as well.

I sent back my reply, which indicates that no I am not a spammer, thank you very much:

I’m terribly sorry you are experiencing web scrapers, but honest-to-god it’s not me. I wrote a plugin a long time ago for Wordpress called “WP Autoblog” that can take an RSS feed and import them as a series of posts. The posts get branded with attribution like “Post by XYZ and software by me” which you’re probably mistaking for something I’m actively a part of. I wrote the plugin to aggregate some of my family blogs (ericback.com, elliottback.com) together into a single feed, but it quickly became abused by spammers so I pulled it. You can read more here.

All this in spite of people making photo-aggregators, sitewide tagging, and making Planet sites. I can’t believe how much grief a hacky Wordpress plugin has given me over the years. Hopefully as it gets more and more out of date, this query count will start to drop from 400k (not that much) to a few hundred. Then I will smile.

There’s a new monetization service from AdBrite which is quite promising. It’s called BritePic and offers to overlay assorted controls on top of your images, as well as unobtrusive advertisements. Their list of features is long, but rather unimpressive:

# Email this image
# Link to this image
# Embed this image (you still get the ad revenue, even if your pic is embedded elsewhere)
# Zoom in and out (see demo)
# Captions that slide out when you hover over the pic
# Ads from AdBrite
# Link the image to another URL
# Subscribe to RSS

What really shines is the user interface for their BritePic enhancements. It’s a sheer, transparent overlay that reacts to mouse events and hides when not active. For example, it adds a header which you can mouseover to show the advertisement:

There’s also a menu added to the bottom to produce a list of features:

I’m definitely going to start running the ads on this blog, just because I like how easy they are to use, and how little they get in the way of the user experience. I coded up a quick Wordpress plugin to replace all image tags with appropriate adbrite tags, and it works fine for me so far: adbrite-images.rar. You need to replace the Adbrite ID with your own, and then activate and you’re good to go.