Ashley Rich posted an article about improving WordPress performance using NGINX caching. There are a ton of WordPress page caching plugins available, but limiting yourself to cache plugins alone means leaving significant performance improvements on the table.
WordPress page caching plugins alleviate this issue by generating a static HTML version of the request, which is usually saved to the filesystem. Subsequent requests serve the static HTML file, instead of querying the database and re-rendering the page.
One thing is clear, NGINX FastCGI Caching is blazingly fast and relatively easy to configure. However, it does have its quirks, namely, the difficulty with invalidating the cache.
NGINX FastCGI Caching works great when both NGINX and PHP run under the same system user.
The article has following sections:
- How WordPress page caching plugins work
- Why caching plugins perform poorly in NGINX
- Making Simple Cache Fly
Handy NGINX feature is also automatic compression of HTML files before sending them to the browser. Interesting read for any web developer!
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