I’ve been a big fan of the WP Super Cache plugin for WordPress, which serves caches html files to make pages load faster and to help sites survive if they suddenly receive a big traffic spike. In the past I’d manually tweaked the plugin to get it to work with APC, which caches compiled WordPress PHP files, but now there’s a plugin that does it automatically.
The WordPress SuperCache-Plus plugin works automatically with caching tools like eAccelerator, Memcached and APC out f the box. The plugin is based on WP-Super Cache, but replaces the WP-Cache filesystem storage with eAccelerator1 or some other storage. The mod_rewrite ‘Super Cache’ functionality is essentially unchanged and mfunc / mclude handling is still in there.
The idea behind doing it was that it would be faster for cookied page views than the standard WP-Cache system, and indeed this seems to be the case. My server showed a 45% increase in requests per second. Your mileage may vary, but you too could easily see performance gains of up to and including more (or less) than that. Speed from the Super Cache via mod_rewrite is not affected.
It also adds a number of improvements over WP Super Cache:
- Supports multiple storage back-ends;
- Will send 304 Not Modified responses where appropriate.
- Garbage collection is entirely automatic in the background.
No admin settings or intervention is required. - Support for multiple servers on different ports.
- Support for purging frontend caches like Squid, Varnish etc.
- provides usual stats so you can see exactly how the cache is performing
After installing, I could see immediate speed improvements on my sites. The only things that are slowing my pages down now is the time it takes to run some external scripts.
More: SuperCache-Plus
