Linux

After moving melikedev.com to a vps, I was able to improve performance by configuring nginx to serve static assets while apache serves the content. In order to test if the NGinx config was correctly configured I used the ‘curl’ command to test response headers of known static assets. After testing and implementing the changes the site has never performed better.

When testing response headers I passed a few flags to the curl command; the ‘-I’ flag tells curl to only output the response headers, and the ‘-L’ flag tells curl which link you want the response headers for.

mpurcell@service1 -> curl -I -L http://melikedev.com/wp-content/plugins/sociable/js/sociable.js?ver=3.4.2

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: nginx/1.0.15
Date: Thu, 24 Jan 2013 21:20:44 GMT
Content-Type: text/css
Content-Length: 63287
Last-Modified: Sat, 29 Dec 2012 08:50:42 GMT
Connection: keep-alive
Expires: Thu, 31 Dec 2037 23:55:55 GMT
Cache-Control: max-age=315360000
Pragma: public
Cache-Control: public
Accept-Ranges: bytes

Notice in the response headers the response code is 200, which is good. But notice the expires date, this far out date allows the browser to cache the static asset for a long time, which means when a return user refreshes the page, the static assets should be loaded from browser cache.

There was one more performance step I took to speed up the render time of the melikedev.com pages, and that was to compress static assets such as xml, html, css etc. In order to test whether the compression was I working I had to add an extra flag to the curl command line, the ‘-H’ flag. This flag allows you to pass custom headers to the request header, which can dictate the data contained within response headers.

mpurcell@service1 -> curl -I -H "Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate" -L http://melikedev.com/wp-content/plugins/sociable/css/sociable.css?ver=3.4.2

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: nginx/1.0.15
Date: Thu, 24 Jan 2013 21:24:30 GMT
Content-Type: text/css
Last-Modified: Sat, 29 Dec 2012 08:50:41 GMT
Connection: keep-alive
Expires: Thu, 31 Dec 2037 23:55:55 GMT
Cache-Control: max-age=315360000
Pragma: public
Cache-Control: public
Content-Encoding: gzip

Notice in this set of response headers the return code was 200 and the expires date was still the far out date, but notice the ‘Content-Encoding’ field, it responded with gzip. This means that because we told the server we are accepting gzip and deflate as encodings, the server compressed the static asset.

Taking steps to increase performance makes end users happy and increases hardware life cycles.