What do we mean by performance and scalability?
Performance refers to the speed of the system. Basically, how long does it take to produce a page? Performance is a result of how long it takes to render a page (i) on the server and (ii) on the client side in the browser.
Scalability refers to the ability of the system to handle more requests. ie. as the load increases on a system how is it placed to handle it. What is the throughput of the site under heavy load? For anonymous users and logged in users? How stable is the system? Are there faults or errors? How many resources are consumed?
It is important to focus on both aspects. A site which performs well provides a strong foundation on which a scalable solution can be based. Performance improvements can be made on a number of different levels: (i) data access, (ii) code efficiency and (iii) page rendering. The aim of the game is to ensure that you have removed any major bottlenecks from each of these layers. There is no point in optimizing one when problems exist in others. Scalability comes mainly from (i) caching at the page or block level, (ii) web server request handling and (iii) scaling out web servers.
What can we do together to achieve optimum levels?
Our main focus is to guide you on the whole stack, as explained above, to ensure that you become aware of what is being tuned. One need to appreciate the quality of hard work put in to understand the glory of the achievement. Our journey will produce a site that you’ve always dreamt of.
What we like to stress on mainly is the continuity of the initial effort one puts in to get the site running blazingly fast. This is of utmost priority and we ensure our clients understand this. Your focus will ensure that all best practices that were intertwined initially, must be adhered to at all times to ensure best performance.
We expertise in the following high performance areas -
- Aegir
- Nginx
- Redis
- PHP-FPM
- APC
- Super Boost
- Server tuning [Debian linux recommended]