I am using dreampress + Newsletter Theme, and found that my site is really slow. I enabled PageSpeed mod from domain management settings but this doesn’t affect a lot. Any solutions for using varnish cache with this theme?
Thanks
The developers recommend to use W3 Total Cache. Also, checkout the Pagespeed topic for some great tips from some other guys.
Varnish is often used at server level, and that is the Dreamhost interpretation. You often need to let them know you’re running a WordPress site, or visit your control panel to tweak the settings for the cache. Since this runs on server “above” the typical second-tier plugins like W3 or Total Cache, you should not have to use the plugins stuff at all.
However, with mod_pagespeed running also, there are some things you will want to tweak (you can see my settings in the pagespeed sticky topic; but Dreamhost will likely have some things which can/cannot be set to “on” by using either your control panel or .htacess file declaration at top — again, see my settings in the forum pagespeed topic here).
Also, remember when testing that a page is slow first time when being cached, then subsequent visits are cached on server.
However, I’d likely
1) do a Google search for
Dreamhost DreamPress Varnish + Mod_Pagespeed + WordPress
2) check with your hosting provider (Dreamhost) for optimum setup for Varish and mod_pagespeed for WordPress, since they deal with that all the time and may even have a support FAQ on the right settings to use.
The combination of Varnish and mod_pagespeed is truly awesome. We are using APC opcode cache + mod_pagespeed on our server.
Normally the main issue is connecting mod_pagespeed to Varnish for caching so that mod_pagespeed can see updated content properly, but I’m certain DreamHost would have that properly connected by default or nothing would work right.
Hope that helps.
Upshot: with Varnish and Mod_pagespeed (aka “GPS”), you should not need to run a caching plugin (in theory).
Thanks Christopher for reply. I have contacted dreamhost staff and they first told me that i don’t need to use any plugin and the speed will be improved with in a week. After that, i said if i want to, then they said that’s purely upto you. We recommend W3 Total Cache with some settings mentioned in Dreampress Wiki.
Therefore from now, i am not going to use any plugin. Thanks a lot.
My pleasure. I ended up not using cache plugin, since mod_pagespeed does great job in combination with server-based cache since it doesn’t have to run through the php system or wordpress code as a caching “plugin” does. You *can* use one, but I found it didn’t help much really and caused too many issues when I need to update a page or template.
Trick is knowing how to clear the cache on server when you go to update the theme to clear out everything before and after upgrade so web browsers can “see” the new versions of the style sheets.
But I think you’ve got it 🙂
