How do I tune wordpress so I can make my site more responsive?

Question

I have a Linode that has Ubuntu loaded and am hosting a WordPress site. I would like to optimize my site so that I no longer get Out of Memory errors like the following:

Killed process 16660 (apache2) total-vm:186232kB, anon-rss:87404kB, file-rss:0kB

I have 512 MB of ram and whenever I get a spike of 500+ users trying to access the site, the site becomes unresponsive and I start getting the errors above.

Please let me know of any optimizations that I can make to help improve site performance.

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

If you have full root access to the box, you might want to look at some of the tweaks on Elliott C. Back's Post: Why My Site Is So Much Faster Than Yours. Some can be done on Non Root enabled boxes (like W3 Super Cache, which i use for my own sites), but others may need root access for (like tweaking MySQL, PHP OpCode, Apache and Kernel tweaks).

Answer 2

The best is to remove unnecessary plug-in(s) that your site doesn't need. I had the problem, by one plug-in that keep me from writing any new post, removing that plug-in made everything correct and solved my problem.

if you can - request a log file from your hosting provider, so you can have a look at what things in your wordpress (actually FTP) makes your site slower.

You can also look at your theme - is it generated to work effectively in Wordpress, and in what version of Wordpress - different versions and themes that isn't compatible can also sometimes slow the site down.

make sure on the front end - viewing the site, you don't have any thing like flash or pop-up menus - that has to load and have to open up when the viewer do something on the site. This can also slow things down.

Hope this is a little guide line to help you.