A question on settings to make site load faster.

[ikester7579]

Wordpress has 1,000's of plugins for just about anything you want. Here's the dilemma.

1) There's a plugin that increases the number of connections this is how it works according to programmer:
Standard HTTP v1.1 requests only allow 2 connections, at the same time, from the same domain. This plugin will virtualize connections, through defined subdomains. You can have as many subdomains as you like, but I do recommend using a maximum of 5.

2) Then we have the normal caching program for wordpress.

3) Then we can also enable Gzip compression.

So the question is, if all things are used would that be over doing it? And if so which combination would be best?

Side note: When you upgrade wordpress it turns off the Gzip compression and you have to re-enable it. You can check you Gzip status here: http://www.gidnetwork.com/tools/gzip-test.php

[bdh]

I think the most important thing one can do to make a page load fast is to use one of the tools like http://tools.pingdom.com and use the bar graphs to checkout each and every item that loads. This is the only way to streamline bottlenecks "scientifically". If a page is large, it will take long to load period ... size is everything, so that's the first thing to work on.

Seriously, IMO all these accelerators and gadgets only serve to make your site a target for DoS attacks, less stable and most likely open to scripting exploits. To me, Multi threading - unless you have millions oh hits and multiple servers - only means there need less attackers in a swarm to bring your site/server down.

[ikester7579]

Hi, the virtual subdomains are made on the same site. To protect them I put .htacess file in each one. I may turn off the caching system and just use the gzip. Compression is around 70-80%. The caching only seems to help in speed if you don;t have gzip enabled.

How the parallel loading system works is that you make extra subdomains in your CP. When you put their http location in the plugin the plugin puts one file in there that allows wordpress to load through the subdomains and act like extra connections to everyone's browsers. The plugin tells you to put .htaccess files in each subdomain folder.

There is only one caching plugin I have seen really make wordpress load super fast. But it's very complex (has like 30 settings) and the programmer has not updated it in more than a year so it won't work with the newest version of WordPress. And it uses cookies which some servers block.

[bdh]

gzip is enabled by default.

You're right about the cookies. Especially with all the (essential) security features in browsers these days ... NoScript (which everyone should use in Firefox) would probably (correctly) block them.