It had been quite some years since I last looked at the options for PDF generation in PHP, so when I needed to add PDF support to Brandfeed I did a bit of research. I ended up on this Stackoverflow thread which overall seems to recommend TCPDF with some fairly strong supporters for other libraries, including mPDF.
I wasn’t looking forward to trying them all out to decide which library to use, but as it turns out I didn’t have to. When I discovered wkhtmltopdf, my decision was made. (I know that sounds like a cheesy marketing testimonial, bare with me)
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The final stage in speeding up my blog was to add some serious caching to the front of it. This may even have been overkill, because it was already pretty swift under nginx/php-fpm, but cutting out the database connections would speed it up even more.
I had a quick go with the W3 Total Cache WordPress plug-in, but it seems rather biased to running Apache (which I’m not) and I experienced some strange errors that I failed to immediately fix. Rather than wrestle with it, or try other WordPress caches, I decided to get to grips with Varnish. This is something I’d been meaning to do for ages, and of course it isn’t limited to WordPress – Varnish is a fabulous caching solution for whatever site you’re building.
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As part of my “speeding up my blog” series, I planned to write a nice, informative post about upgrading to WordPress 3, deploying your theme to a CDN, and getting it all running under nginx. Unfortunately WordPress irritated me so much in the process, that this has turned into more of rant. Sorry in advance.
I have a like/hate relationship with WordPress. That is to say that it does a lot, it has a great admin area and there’s a large community producing themes and plug-ins. However, I am a PHP developer of many years, and every time I come into direct contact with the core WordPress code-base I end up being sick in my mouth.
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«« See previous post for getting nginx up and running. This post is about getting PHP running as a FastCGI.
Speeding up my blog
Performance issues aren’t just for high traffic sites. I’m lucky if I get 50 visitors a day to this site, but by using scaling techniques popular with the big boys, I figured I could increase page load speeds, (good for visitors and good for SEO). If I could achieve this and use less resources, perhaps I could even save some money on my hosting bills. I currently run a 512MB VPS on Slicehost, and I’d rather not increase this right now.
With a few days off work, I decided to take the plunge and swap out some of the server tech powering this blog. From the bottom up, so to speak, this was as follows -
- Replace Apache with Nginx (below)
- Upgrade to PHP 5.3.3 and run as a FastCGI (next post)
- Upgrade to WordPress 3
- Deploy a CDN
- Add a Varnish cache for extra speed
I’ll go through my experience across a number of posts, starting with Nginx. I shan’t replicate any existing documentation; I’m just going to go through what I did and point you at the resources you’ll need.
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