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WordPress Performance with HHVM
With Heroku-WP I hoped to lower the bar in getting WordPress up and running on a more modern tech stack. But what are the performance implications of running WordPress on such a modern set of technologies? Surely it’s faster but by how much and is the performance gains worth the trouble? To answer that I’ve…
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Elasticsearch StatsD Plugin
If you’re running a multi-node Elasticsearch cluster checkout Automattic’s fork of the Elasticsearch StatsD Plugin for pushing cluster and node metrics to StatsD.
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WordPress on NGINX + HHVM with Heroku Buildpacks
It’s been a year since I last made any major changes to my WordPress on Heroku build and in tech years that’s a lifetime. Since then Heroku has released a new PHP buildpack with nginx and HHVM built in. Much progress have also been made both HHVM and WordPress to make both compatible with each…
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Introducing Whatson, an Elasticsearch Consulting Detective
Over the past few months I’ve been working with the Elasticsearch cluster at Automattic. While we monitor longititudinal statics on the cluster through Munin when something is amiss there’s currently not a good place to take a look and drill down to see what the issue is. I use various Elasticsearch plugins however they all…
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Static Asset Caching Using Apache on Heroku
There’s been many articles written about how to properly implement static asset caching over the years and the best practices boil down three things. Make sure the server is sending RFC compliant caching headers. Send long expires headers for static assets. Use version numbers in asset paths so that we can precisely control expiration.
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20 Million Hits a Day With WordPress For Free
As the price of cloud computing continues to tumble we can do what was previously unthinkable. It wasn’t long ago that getting WordPress to scale to 10 million hits a day for $15 a month was front page hacker news material; but we can do even better.
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Proxies & IP Spoofing
Back in the good old days of client-server architectures you had one person sitting in front of a browser connecting directly to your server. So if you ever wanted to know who that person is all you needed to do was to take a look at the REMOTE_ADDR of your requests.
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Building Modules on Heroku
I’ve run this site on Heroku for a while now but something has always bothered me, the default Apache install on the Cedar stack does not come with mod_deflate forcing us to send everything sent to clients uncompressed. Now I get that bandwidth is cheap but CPU time with zlib is cheaper and there’s no reason to…
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Caching in the Clouds
When it comes to running content management systems there are always more reads then writes (hopefully) so caching becomes of utmost importance for a successful WordPress install. With a product as mature as WordPress there are tons of options out there, from APC object caching to static HTML file generation to caching with CDN distribution management.
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WordPress on Heroku
With 18% of the internet running off WordPress and between 50–100k sites launching on it every day using WordPress seemed the obvious choice. Where to host it however, was a more difficult decision. With such a large market share comes a myriad of deployment options. From large turnkey blog as a service providers like WordPress.com…