Mon 27 Jul 2009
W3 Total Cache
Posted by Frederick Townes under Plugins[35] Comments
(97 votes, average: 4.41 out of 5)
Loading ...W3 Total Cache improves the user experience of your blog by caching frequent operations, reducing the weight of various theme files and providing transparent content delivery network integration. The goal is to improve the user experience for the readers of your blog without having to change WordPress, your theme, your plugins or how you produce your content. When fully utilized, your blog will be able to sustain extremely high traffic spikes without requiring hardware upgrades or removing features or functionality from your theme.
Features and benefits include:
- Improved progressive render (non-blocking CSS and JS embedding)
- Reduced HTTP Transactions, DNS lookups, reduced document load time
- Transparent content delivery network (CDN) support with automated media library import
- Bandwidth savings via Minify and HTTP compression (gzip / deflate) for HTML, CSS and JS
- Minification (concatenation, white space removal) of inline, external or 3rd party JS and CSS with scheduled updates
- Optional embedding of JS just above </body>
- Support for caching pages, posts, feeds, database objects, CSS, JS in memory with APC or memcached or both
- Caching of RSS/Atom Feeds (comments, page and site), URIs with query string variables (like search result pages), Database queries, Pages, Posts, CSS and JS
- Complete header management including Etags
- Increased web server concurrency and reduced resource consumption, increased scale
In essence, anything that can be automated to squeeze out every bit of server performance and minimize bandwidth utilization has been done, leaving your readers with an optimized user experience.
(97 votes, average: 4.41 out of 5) Loading ...
good stuff
LOVE IT!!!
[...] Frederick Townes : W3 Total Cache [...]
Would this plugin be a replacement for WP Cache? Just wanted to double check before trying the plugin out.
There is a lot of work that goes into a plugin like this, hopefully one day the plugins that I offer on my blog will continue to evolve into heavy hitters like this one offered here.
how does this play on an WPMU site?
Does it work?
Is it per site?
Can it set-up for all sites?
5/5 stars!
[...] Frederick Townes : W3 Total Cache [...]
[...] Frederick Townes : W3 Total Cache [...]
I second Spunky Jones question.
How does this plugin compare to wp-super-cache ?
Thanks,
Tal
5/5 stars…
@Spunky Jones SEO Strategy, @Tal Galili:
Yes, this is a replacement (and more) for wp-cache and wp super-cache. Depending on your configuration apache bench shows 50-100% speed improvement over wp super-cache.
@paul:
The documentation is ahead of the current release. Hopefully with the next release the answer to all questions will be yes.
If it’s speed improvement rate is a lot bigger than wp-chache then it’s a must have plugin.
@Off-topic
Whatever plugin you are using for rating the post has a problem, try to hover on the stars at the bottom of the post.
@Eric, nothing beats memory caching.
Also FYI, new release out today with a handful of bug fixes.
care to compare to db cache? http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/db-cache/ and maybe widget cache too? http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/widget-cache
I guess a lot of users are wondering which caching solution to use and which ones can be combined…
Again a new minor release out today with a handful of bug fixes and full WP MU Support.
I´ve just saw this plugin quoted in twitter by @yoast
One question: will this work side by side with ‘wp-widget cache’ plugin, Frederick? Or it´s better to disable it too? (or better) Does it cache sidebar widgets?
Thanks.
[...] Frederick Townes : W3 Total Cache [...]
[...] Frederick Townes : W3 Total Cache [...]
@Claudio, yes it will cache the output of your widgets if they produce HTML as opposed to dynamically load content via JavaScript for example (as you likely already understand).
As far as conflict with wp-widge cache, I haven’t looked into it, but any other caching is likely to be unnecessary and cause conflicts. I can’t say more without testing and would appreciate your input.
I’ve been playing around with this one. I don’t have any significant observations to make yet about its performance (maybe after I post about it and get a normal traffic spike).
I will note that I had to turn of “line break removal” in the HTML minimize options. With it turned on, it broke one of my analytics scripts (reinvigorate) for some reason.
I’m also not sure that I’m getting maximum bnefit, because I’m strapped for RAM on my server, so I’m not giving memcached as much memory as I’d like. But that’s not W3TC’s fault.
@Dougal, thanks for checking out the plugin. Line break removal will definitely break code for various reasons, which is why it’s not enabled by default. Your mileage will definitely vary. For most blogs 128MB or 256MB of memory cache is more than enough to fully benefit from W3 Total Cache.
@Frederick:
how about making it work with eaccelerator too, not only APC and memcache?
@ovidiu, that’s a possibility. But will visit that after full release (v1.0).
Another release will be available shortly.
[...] Shared WordPress Plugin Competition Blog » W3 Total Cache [...]
Version 0.7.51 just release with some improvements and bug fixes.
Version 0.7.52 just released!
Version 0.8 is finally here with some exciting improvements:
* Added disk as method for page caching
* Added support for mirror (origin pull) content delivery networks
* Added options to specify minify group policies per template
* Added options for toggling inline CSS and JS minification to improve minify reliability
* Added option to update Media Library attachment hostnames (when migrating domains etc)
* Added “Empty Cache” buttons to respective tabs
* Added additional file download fallback methods for minify
* Improved cookie handling
* Improved header handling
* Improved reliability of Media Library import
* “Don’t cache pages for logged in users” is now the default page cache setting
* Fixed minify bug with RSS feeds
* Fixed minify bug with rewriting of url() URI in CSS
* Addressed more page cache invalidity cases
* Addressed rare occurrence of PHP fatal errors when saving post or comments
* Addressed CSS bug on wp-login.php
* Addressed rare MySQL error when uploading attachments to Media Library
* Modified plugin file/directory structure
* Confirmed compatibility with varnish and squid
Hi Frederick,
I’m new to blogging and don’t really understand fully what W3 Total Cache does – other then making things work faster.
The thing is i noticed my blogs RSS feed is broken one the plug is activated and work fine again when i disable the plug…
Disabling just the RSS caching doesn’t seem to solve this
is this a know issue?
cheers
hello
Hi Ronen, you have my email let’s continue there as this is not a known issue.
Hey Frederick,
With W3 Total Cache enabled, I also run into issues with invalid XML in my RSS feed, even if RSS caching is off.. did you find any issues with it?
Thanks!
-Nate
@Nate Carlson, if you’re using the latest version please submit a bug submission ticket using the support tab of the plugin so I can take a look at your situation. Issues with RSS were fixed about 2 months ago.
Unfortunately, I didn’t receive and email notification about this comment. No there are no issues with feeds in recent releases.
I am using this plugin with WPMU 2.9.2 and having a problem getting CDN to work for files located in the /files directory. I am using Amazon Cloudfront. All other files in theme folders work fine for CDN. Although they are uploaded to amazon, they show a broken image on the site or they just simply show the the image without pulling it from CDN (a mixture of both). I have tried adding the following to the custom file list: files/* and /wp-content/blogs.dir/1/files/* and neither seem to work. They upload all of the images just fine, but they do not display correctly. Perhaps this has something to do with how wpmu rewrites the file directory links? Have you ever encountered this issue? I really only need the blog 1 files to use CDN since that’s where all the posts are written. The other blogs are not currently in use. Any hints in the right direction would be greatly appreciated! Also if you have any other tips for using this plugin with WPMU and BuddyPress specifically, I would be happy to write up a little guide for users in this category. The plugin is fantastic, and other than this one issue, I haven’t had any other problems with it.