Today it was time to take another look at my site speed. As sites grow you need to adjust server settings etc. I just wanted to post my experiences here. I could write a book about optimizing dedicated servers by now (I’m not joking btw), so it’s a very wide topic, but here are my tips.

1. Get Firebug, check connection

2. I saw a lot of Waiting connections – also verified this via shell and saw a lot of TIME_WAIT connections.

3. Check your hosting panel or via shell how many requests are currently processed (the maximum will be MaxClients but depends on ServerLimit)

4. I constantly saw 150, so I figured I had to increase my MaxClients and possibly decrease StartServers because it was allocating a lot of RAM

5. If you use a CMS, go through your list of plugins. If there are any that you don’t use disable them

6. If you happen to use WordPress, here are two things that I added to my index.php template file today:

<?php wp_deregister_script('jquery'); wp_deregister_style('thickbox'); wp_head(); ?>

What it does is to deregister thickbox and jquery on your index page. Both are not required on the index unless you use some worthless crappy plugins that require it.

7. Put all images in the same folder. Yes move images from your template folder to your main image folder. No clue why this speeds up the site speed, but apparently it does.

[B]Here are my old server settings:[/B]

[LIST]
[*]Timeout 10
[*]TraceEnable Off
[*]StartServers 30
[*]MinSpareServers 20
[*]MaxSpare Servers 50
[*]ServerLimit 150
[*]MaxClients 150
[*]MaxRequestsPerChild 8000
[*]KeepAlive On
[*]KeepAliveTimeout 4
[*]MaxKeepAliveRequests 1000
[/LIST]

[B]Here are my new settings:[/B]

[*]Timeout 10
[*]TraceEnable Off
[*]StartServers [COLOR="Red"]15[/COLOR]
[*]MinSpareServers 20
[*]MaxSpare Servers 50
[*]ServerLimit [COLOR="Red"]190[/COLOR]
[*]MaxClients [COLOR="Red"]190[/COLOR]
[*]MaxRequestsPerChild 8000
[*]KeepAlive On
[*]KeepAliveTimeout 4
[*]MaxKeepAliveRequests 1000