Getting Just A Bit More
In my quest for performance... These are the top enhancements I've made recently:
- New server: my host has KVM servers at a lower price than OpenVZ (what I had). In addition to saving money, I have increased memory, more storage, and a dedicated kernel (Open VZ shares kernels). More memory means better caching configurations, which equals faster sites.
- Brotli with Cloudflare: I had used Brotli (better compression) on my site in the past. Once I moved to Cloudflare as a proxy, they only accepted gzip inbound (though they sent Brotli). Last year they added Brotli passthrough support. Now enabled here, it eliminates half of the compression steps before pages are delivered.
- Redis usage increase: I changed default PHP sessions from files to Redis, reducing latency for some pages.
- New weather data source: I moved to Open-Meteo. The data files are over 80% smaller, for faster loading of the weather forecast.
Researching these improvements, many ask "Why" if only to save a few milliseconds...
Small changes today are the building blocks for great achievement in the future.