TechniTip.Net

WordPress Performance and NextGEN Gallery

A small hint which will help to improve page load time especially when using Firefox or Safari browser:

Maybe you’ve enabled the “flash slideshow” within the Slideshow options of NextGEN gallery. This will load the JW Image Rotator on every page. I’ve disable usage of the flash slideshow by unselecting the option:

[ ] Integrate the flash based slideshow for all flash supported devices

Without usage of the flash image rotator it is still possible to use slideshows. But the overall page load time increases. For me it looks like that loading the flash object causes the overall page display to be delayed. Google Chrome seems to handle loading of the flash object faster.

Anyway for me the fastest browser available seems to be Google Chrome. On my 13″ MacBook I recognize significant performance differences when using Safari, Firefox and Chrome. That’s the reason why I’m currently using Chrome (development version) as browser.

Improve WordPress Admin Performance 2

Here is another quick but good tip to improve the performance of your WordPress admin area:

Delete all revision of every post. It can be achieved using a simple SQL statement:

DELETE a,b,c
FROM wp_posts a
LEFT JOIN wp_term_relationships b ON (a.ID = b.object_id)
LEFT JOIN wp_postmeta c ON (a.ID = c.post_id)
WHERE a.post_type = 'revision'

I do this from time to time. Optionally it’s possible either to disable revison managment or restrict the number of saved revisions by adding one of the following statements into your wp-config.php:

define('WP_POST_REVISIONS', false );

define('WP_POST_REVISIONS', 3);

The information has been taken from weblogtoolscollection.com.

Improve WordPress Admin Performance

WordPress performance is a pain. It’s not  secret. Here is a small tip to improve the WordPress admin dashboard a little bit. First of all I’ve disabled the WordPress Development Blog, Other WordPress News, Plugins and the Latest news from Yoast widgets. It can be done using the Screen Options button on the upper right side of the admin panel.

This is nice, but WordPress does still send a few HTTP requests to netdna.yoast.com. I think it makes no sense because we have disabled the Yoast widget:

To avoid this few unneeded request I’ve installed the Yoast Remove plugin. After installing and enabling the plugin the additional HTTP requests are gone and as a result we’ve improved the load time our admin dashboard a little bit:

Links

• Yoast Remove plugin

Free Hard Disc Benchmark Tool “HD Tach”

A simple and free tool for private usage is available from simplie Software. It lets you run short and long benchmarks of your hard discs and compare the result with other hard discs from a database.

For me it is a sufficient tool as I wanted to compare the overall performance of two different hard discs.

There is also a online shop to buy the software for commercial use.

Links

• HD Tach Homepage

Windows 7 Performance Tuning

Found a few tips on support.microsoft.com how to improve the performance of Windows Vista. Checking my Windows 7 installation it seems that these tips seem also apply to Windows 7. Unfortunately I could not found the English version of this support entry (KB954980), only in German language, but I think it should be understandable because of the many pictures:

• Improve Windows Vista Performance

Basically the article describes 4 things which help to improve the performance:

1. Part 2: Improve boot time using Windows ReadyBoost
2. Part 3: Disable Windows Aero
3. Part 4: Use extended hard disc write cache
4. Part 5: Disable unused hardware

On my Windows 7 installation I followed item 1. and 3. Think I have to make further checks how much it improves performance.

Especially item 1. ReadyBoost sounds interesting: Windows uses a USB stick or flash memory card to as additional cache. But I don’t want to use a USB stick, I want to use a PCI Express flash card adapter with a very fast memory card. Guess this should bring best performance.

After first checks my Windows 7 installation boots in about 1:45 minutes (completely). Looks not so bad, since I’ve already installed software like Photoshop, Office, iTunes, etc. The real boot time of Windows 7 is slightly lower than BIOS start up also needs time, approx. 7 seconds.