How to Run Wordpress Completely From RAM
Posted3 months agoActive3 months ago
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WordpressPerformance OptimizationRAMCaching
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Wordpress
Performance Optimization
RAM
Caching
The article discusses running WordPress entirely from RAM for improved performance, sparking a discussion on the feasibility, benefits, and potential drawbacks of this approach.
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Servers put the most requested into RAM also.
Not always. Most CDNs for websites (essentially reverse proxies) don't cache pages by default so private content isn't made publicly available. You have to enable/configure what is cached.
In this case, Cloudflare isn't caching the HTML: "cf-cache-status: DYNAMIC". If page cache was enabled, it would be something like "HIT" or "MISS".
Cloudflare has a free tiered caching option that helped my site. Instead of cache missing on local edge nodes always having to hit the origin, the edge node can sometimes pull the data from another Cloudflare server. It reduced load on my origin.
Agree with needing to tune and validate caching, one of the biggest changes my PHP site was tuning apc/OPcache sizes.
You don't think taking a small hit on TTFB is a good trade off for the improved scaling that a CDN offers?
Gone are the days that you don't have to worry about bot traffic being a DDOS. An unresponsive site is a lot worse than an extra TCP/TLS setup.
Disk as in spinning round circles, or disk as in NVMe drive, because there's a pretty massive difference in latency.
And maybe that's not surprising, think about it: the typical server does a lot of other things additionally to serving one specific WordPress site.
Use headless CMS plus static site generator. e.g. Strapi plus Astro
There will be lots strapi and astro or whatever preference/interpretation we have personally can't do.
WordPress has it's place, a blanket no against one of the most popular CMSes on the Internet is a pretty hot take.
For a long time now WP no longer just caters to the hacker "Code is Poetry" crowd---and, of course, even less so nowadays with the controversies WP has embroiled itself with. The people who are inclined to choose WP by default do so because of the wealth of plugins available to them, be that Shopify integration or fine-grained tracking of a marketing campaign. They would wonder why someone would ever prefer something "headless". They think static websites are the dinosaurs the Y2K comet wiped out.
Sure we can argue about whether WP is the "best solution" but WP is definitely the solution that works acceptably out-of-the-box. Your CMS of choice probably has a bunch of out-of-the-box solutions for common concerns as well but I doubt that it can handle the edge cases that Head of Marketing will inevitably introduce with their ol' reliable set of integrated services. Shopify + Google Analytics + Salesforce + Airtable[1] always worked for them with WP but suddenly this allegedly-better "headless" CMS is throwing all sorts of dumb errors.
And if a plugin is not available, there is no shortage of WP/PHP developers who can make one at a reasonable price. In contrast, I'm sorry, but honestly your comment is the first time I've heard about Strapi and Astro.
I'm not saying I like the status quo but if someone asks me for a WP site, I give them a hardened EC2 box with WP over Apache/NGINX. Then I return to frying bigger fish.
[1] Just an example.
The overwhelming majority of the speed-up here would come from the database, which is trivially easy to run on tmpfs. When using Docker, it's literally a one-liner! For example:
docker run -d --tmpfs /var/lib/mysql -p 127.0.0.1::3306/tcp -e MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD=[password] mariadb:11.8
Of course you need a really good backup story for this to be a reasonable choice.
And my plain ol' wordpress an 83: https://pagespeed.web.dev/analysis/http-egypt-urnash-com/a1r...
My site's a WP that I started up in like 2012 and it's been running continuously ever since, it's sitting behind Apache, it's got a cache plugin, nothing special at all.
This is a Wordpress site, pagespeed is 96 https://pagespeed.web.dev/analysis/https-www-storwell-com/wn...
Gives me an 97 and 88 respectively[2] on that pagespeed tool.
[0] https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-super-cache/
[1] https://github.com/simonrupf/docker-php-wp/blob/master/etc/n...
[2] https://pagespeed.web.dev/analysis/https-bobcat-dssr-ch/0ziq... / https://pagespeed.web.dev/analysis/https-simon-rupf-net/auk5...
> Because even well-cached files still require filesystem-level permission checks, read cycles, and sometimes fragmentation reassembly.
I'd assume tmpfs still requires filesystem-level permission checks, or am I mistaken?
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Mysql/mariadb have a lot of ram caching as well - they haven't just been sitting on their hands for decades... Still, lets say that this helps - you could probably just use db replication to another machine (or even another container on same machine) that persists to disk.
And the (likely AI-generated) colour commentating got tiring fairly quickly.
Most of all, without a before/after comparison, this is meaningless
I also run MariaDB in RAM, but only for integration tests where data is fictional anyway. Otherwise I'm sure you can't come up with a better solution than they did just by using some sysadmin tricks.