#supercache

New Post has been published on http://okaymarketing.com/wp-rocket-wordpress-caching-plugin-verses-supercache/

WP Rocket WordPress Caching Plugin Verses Supercache

So I keep hearing about Free CDN + Security services like CloudFlare and Incapsula that I figured it is time to give it a try on my simple WordPress site at Host Gator with a shared hosting. 

I also stumbled upon a resource for scalability testing = blitz which has a free plan for cheap-O's like me. 

So here is a very unscientific case study using WP caching with CloudFlare CDN.  

Each test/rush was with concurrent connections scaling 1-250 over 60 secs: 

1) No WP Caching, No CDN - 

This rush generated 110 successful hits in 1.0 min and we transferred 156.25 KB of data in and out of your app. The average hit rate of 1.80/second translates to about 155,825 hits/day.

You got bigger problems though: 99.94% of the users during this rush experienced timeouts or errors!

2) WP Caching, No CDN - 

This rush generated 149 successful hits in 1.0 min and we transferred 1.28 MB of data in and out of your app. The average hit rate of 2.78/second translates to about 239,817 hits/day.

You got bigger problems though: 99.92% of the users during this rush experienced timeouts or errors!

3) WP Caching + CDN - 

This rush generated 6,169 successful hits in 1.0 min and we transferred 50.63 MB of data in and out of your app. The average hit rate of 98/second translates to about 8,506,039 hits/day.

You got bigger problems though: 0.29% of the users during this rush experienced timeouts or errors!

Summary: I ended up using the Super Cache wordpress plugin instead of Total Cache (for some reason I couldn't get the same results with Total Cache). Also it is worth noting how crappy my shared hosting is with Hostgator, I can only get about 149 connections open before my server (shared) gives the fail whale...

There is a slight difference when using caching within wordpress even on my crap load of 149 connections. My site is not very DB intensive but caching helps and enables CloudFlare to work it's magic. 

There is a HUGE difference when caching + CloudFlare are enabled to the tune of ~5,500 % (if I did my math right) which is certainly specific to my shared hosting environment but that isn't too bad for FREE. 

Now this means that all of your WP pages will need to be cached and that might not be an option depending on how you use your WP instance. My site utilizes WP for as a CMS and I don't run my blog through WP. 

Also, it is important to note that CloudFlare isn't the Fastest CDN out there and honestly if I know my traffic wasn't ever going north of 50,000 pageviews a day, I would go with out it as the latency (at least in N. America) is faster straight out of Host Gator.