Website overhaul

Finally it’s done!

RC-Thoughts.com has a totally new home. I was struggling to keep the old server up and running with all the bells and whistles I liked. This was basically due type of chosen virtual server, lack of resources on it and simply outdated software like Apache2.2 and PHP 5.6.

Geeky stuff anyone?

Old platform was quite simple, SSD-Cached OpenVZ with 4 Core CPU, 1Gb memory. And as said, running Apache 2.2 with PHP 5.6.

I tried PHP7 but was not happy, PHP just eats too much resources with wordpress. Also there was something strange in the config, web-server would give 500 Errors occasionally and without a trace anywhere. Those a now in the past too.

So, for starters I got myself a new server, it’s now running on Ramnode’s Premium KVM with 4 Core CPU, 2Gb memory and no cache on SSD.

I turned the back-end totally around too, RC-Thoughts is now running on Nginx + HHVM on server, no more resource-hungry PHP. (Actually whole server has no PHP installed at all).

One of the biggest improvements is leaving HTTP/1.1 behind and moving over to HTTP/2 since this is now possible. This has reduced traffic with ~20-35% per page-load.

Fine tuning the performance have taken better part of all evening in last two weeks but it was well worth it.

Load times?

I have been benchmarking the site a lot with GTmetrix and other similar tools. A few months ago I was at 5-7 seconds load-times on first page. Now a bit depending on readers location it can be under a second from US and under half a second from London. So, not bad in my book.

I will experiment with content delivery network in nearest days so these times will most likely improve. This should not give any downtime so no harm done there. I hope…

Pretty please…

If you notice anything strange in website behavior please drop me a line in here! Thanks in advance!

Thanks and best regards, Tero from RC-Thoughts.com