Recently I upgraded my shared hosting plan to a VPS (Virtual Private Server). Part of the reason is that when your blog gets enough hits, WordPress and MySQL become increasingly demanding. My page load times were around 8 seconds previously. Since switching to a VPS plan, I have decreased that to 1-2s which is much more acceptable. What makes load time interesting is that major internet sites see people turn away if load times are high.
“For Google an increase in page load time from 0.4 second to 0.9 seconds decreased traffic and ad revenues by 20%. For Amazon every 100 ms increase in load times decreased sales with 1%.”1
This suggests to me that I had better get page load time under control, or my blog won’t reach many people on the internet. Since I already was paying for shared hosting, the jump up to a VPS was not much more money. The result is fantastic though, as I get a server with root access, and better yet it runs on Ubuntu.
The Cherokee website provides a Benchmarks page2 which covers Cherokee being tested against Apache, Lighttpd and Nginx. Cherokee always does really well in these bench marks, and was designed with a focus on security. My website, which gets over 1000 unique visitors a day, with WordPress / MySQL / Cherokee only uses 119 megabytes of ram on my VPS. Cherokee itself is only using 10 megabytes, which shows just how lean it is. In addition to that, it also services requests very efficiently:
Requests per second with 20 concurrent clients
Another factor which pushed me to Cherokee is the way Cherokee is configured. It provides a great, easy to understand / intuitive web interface for configuration. I never had to open up a .conf file and edit it, and yet the configuration it generated is still in plain text and easy to understand should I need to. That is exactly what the webserver world has needed for a long time.
In the next few weeks I will follow up with a detailed Cherokee installation / configuration tutorial and some other fun things I have done with the VPS. If you want to check out Cherokee, their official project website is at: http://www.cherokee-project.com