05.10.06

wp-cache

Tagged as WordPress

I wanted to speed things up a bit, so I looked into cache options for WordPress. Supposedly WordPress 2 (which I am using) has a built-in cache, but either it’s not working or it’s just not very effective, because this site was running a lot slower than I wanted it to.

There’s a plugin called wp-cache that I’d tried before but decided against because I was using some other plugins that shouldn’t be cached, such as wp-scrobbler. Since I’m no longer using those plugins, I decided to give wp-cache another try. Immediately, however, I ran into some problems, foremost of which was the fact that the first time I loaded any given URL, I got a blank page. Subsequent reloads were fine. Turns out the problem has to do with running the plugin under WordPress 2.0.2 on PHP 5; that combination apparently doesn’t work in the default setup. There is a fix, but it’s buried in the comments (#183, to be precise), so I figured I’d repeat it here in case any of my readers run into the problem.

To fix the problem, open up wp-cache-phase2.php in the wp-cache folder, find the wp_cache_ob_end() function definition, and change the ob_end_clean() function call to ob_end_flush(). In version 2.0.17 of the plugin, which is current as of this writing, the line that needs to be changed is #219.

The plugin makes a huge difference in response time, and should also make your web host happy, since it requires less CPU time and fewer database calls.

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