This post is a version of the slideshow presentation I did at Hack and Tell in Fort Lauderdale, Florida at The Collide Factory on Saturday, April 2, 2011. These are 5 minute talks where each slide auto-advances after fifteen seconds which limits the amount of detail that can be conveyed.

A brief introduction

What makes a page load quickly? While we can look at various metrics, there are quite a few things that impact pageloads. While the page can be served quickly, the design of the page can often times impact the way that the page is rendered in the browser which can make a site appear to be sluggish. However, we’re going to focus on the mechanics of what it takes to get a page to serve quickly.

The Golden Rule – do as few calculations as possible to hand content to your surfer.

But my site is dynamic!

Do you really need to calculate the last ten posts entered on your blog every time someone visits the page? Surely you could cache that and purge the cache when a new post is entered. When someone adds a new comment, purge the cache and let it be recalculated once.

But my site has user personalization!

Can that personalization be broken into it’s own section of the webpage? Or, is it created by a cacheable function within your application? Even if you don’t support fragment caching on the edge, you can emulate that by caching your expensive SQL queries or even portions of your page.

Even writing a generated file to a static file and allowing your webserver to serve that static file provides an enormous boost. This is what most of the caching plugins for WordPress do. However, they are page caching, not fragment caching, which means that the two most expensive queries that WordPress executes, Category list and Tag Cloud, are generated each time a new page is hit until that page is cached.

One of the problems with high performance sites is the never-ending quest for that Time to First Byte. Each load balancer or proxy in front adds some latency. It also means a page needs to be pre-constructed before it is served, or, you need to do a little trickery. This eliminates being able to do any dynamic processing on the page in order to hand a response back as quickly as possible unless you’ve got plenty of spare computing horsepower.

With this, we’re left with a few options to have a dynamic site that has the performance of a statically generated site.

Amazon was one of the first to embrace the Page and Block method by using Mason, a mod_perl based framework. Each of the blocks on the page was generated ahead of time, and only the personalized blocks were generated ‘late’. This allowed the frontend to assemble these pieces, do minimal work to display the personal recommendations and present the page quickly.

Google took a different approach by having an immense amount of computing horsepower behind their results. Google’s method probably isn’t cost effective for most sites on the Internet.

Facebook developed bigpipe which generates pages and then dynamically loads portions of the page into the DOM units. This makes the page load quickly, but in stages. The viewer sees the rough page quickly as the rest of the page fills in.

The Presentation begins here

Primary Goal

Fast Pageloads – We want the page to load quickly and render quickly so that the websurfer doesn’t abandon the site.

Increased Scalability – Once we get more traffic, we want the site to be able to scale and provide websurfers with a consistent, fast experience while the site grows.

Metrics We Use

Time to First Byte – This is a measure of how quickly the site responds to an incoming request and starts sending the first byte of data. Some sites have to take time to analyze the request, build the page, etc before sending any data. This lag results in the browser sitting there with a blank screen.

Time to Completion – We want the entire page to load quickly enough that the web surfer doesn’t abandon. While we can do some tricky things with chunked encoding to fool websurfers into thinking our page loads more quickly than it really does, for 95% of the sites, this is a decent metric.

Number of Requests – The total number of requests for a page is a good indicator of overall performance. Since most browsers will only request a handful of static assets from a page per hostname, we can use a CDN, embed images in CSS or use Image Sprites to reduce the number of requests.

Why Cache?

Expecting Traffic

When we have an advertising campaign or holiday promotion going on, we don’t know what our expected traffic level might be, so, we need to prepare by having the caching in place.

Receiving Traffic

If we receive unexpected publicity, or our site is listed somewhere, we might cache to allow the existing system to survive a flood of traffic.

Fighting DDOS

When fighting a Distributed Denial of Service Attack, we might use caching to avoid the backend servers from getting overloaded.

Expecting Traffic

There are several types of caching we can do when we expect to receive traffic.

* Page Cache – Varnish/Squid/Nginx provide page caching. A static copy of the rendered page is held and updated from time to time either by the content expiring or being purged from the cache.
* Query Cache – MySQL includes a query cache that can help on repetitive queries.
* Wrap Queries with functions and cache – We can take our queries and write our own caching using a key/value store, avoiding us having to hit the database backend.
* Wrap functions with caching – In Python, we can use Beaker to wrap a decorator around a function which does the caching magic for us. Other languages have similar facilities.

Receiving Traffic

* Page Caching – When we’re receiving traffic, the easiest thing to do is to put a page cache in place to save the backend/database servers from getting overrun. We lose some of the dynamic aspects, but, the site remains online.

* Fragment Caching – With fragment caching, we can break the page into zones that have separate expiration times or can be purged separately. This can give us a little more control over how interactive and dynamic the site appears while it is receiving traffic.

DDOS Handling

* Slow Client/Vampire Attacks – Certain DDOS attacks cause problems with some webserver software. Recent versions of Apache and most event/poll driven webservers have protection against this.
* Massive Traffic – With some infrastructures, we’re able to filter out the traffic ahead of time – before it hits the backend.

Caching Easy, Purging Hard

Caching is scaleable. We can just add more caching servers to the pool and keep scaling to handle increased load. The problem we run into is keeping a site interactive and dynamic as content needs to be updated. At this point, purging/invalidating cached pages or regions requires communication with each cache.

Page Caching

Some of the caching servers that work well are Varnish, Squid and Nginx. Each of these allows you to do page caching, specify expire times, and handle most requests without having to talk to the backend servers.

Fragment Caching

With Edge Side Includes or a Page and Block Construction can allow you to cache pieces of the page as shown in the following diagram. With this, we can individually expire pieces of the page and allow our front end cache, Varnish, to reassemble the pieces to serve to the websurfer.

http://www.trygve-lie.com/blog/entry/esi_explained_simple

Cache Methods

* Hardware – Hard drives contain caches as do many controller cards.
* SQL Cache – adding memory to keep the indexes in memory or enabling the SQL query cache can help.
* Redis/Memcached – Using a key/value store can keep requests from hitting rotational media (disks)
* Beaker/Functional Caching – Either method can use a key/value store, preferably using RAM rather than disk, to prevent requests from having to hit the database backend.
* Edge/Frontend Caching – We can deploy a cache on the border to reduce the number of requests to the backend.

OS Buffering/Caching

* Hardware Caching on drive – Most hard drives today have caches – finding one with a large cache can help.
* Caching Controller – If you have a large ‘hot set’ of data that changes, using a caching controller can allow you to put a gigabyte or more RAM to avoid having to hit the disk for requests. Make sure you get the battery backup card just in case your machine loses power – those disk writes are often reported as completed before they are physically written to the disk.
* Linux/FreeBSD/Solaris/Windows all use RAM for caching

MySQL Query Cache

The MySQL Query cache is simple yet effective. It isn’t smart and doesn’t cache based on query plan, but, if your code base executes queries where the arguments are in the same order, it can be quite a plus. If you are dynamically creating queries, assembling the queries to try and keep the conditions in the same order will help.

Redis/Memcached

* Key Value Store – you can store frequently requested data in memory.
* Nginx can read rendered pages right from Memcached.

Both methods use RAM rather than hitting slower disk media.

Beaker/Functional Caching

With Python, we can use the Beaker decorator to specify caching. This insulates us from having to write our own handler.

Edge/Front End Caching

* Define blocks that can be cached, portions of the templates.
* Page Caching
* JSON (CouchDB) – Even JSON responses can run behind Varnish.
* Bigpipe – Cache the page, and allow javascript to assemble the page.

Content Delivery Network (CDN)

When possible, use a Content Delivery Network to store static assets off net. This adds a separate hostname and sometimes a separate domain name which allows most browsers to fetch more resources at the same time. Preferably you want to use a separate domain name that won’t have any cookies set – which cuts down on the size of the request object sent from the browser to the server with the static assets.

Bigpipe

Facebook uses a technology called Bigpipe which caches the page template and the javascript required to build the page. Once that has loaded, Javascript fetches the data and builds the page. Some of the json data requested is also cached, leading to a very compact page being loaded and built while you’re viewing the page.

Google’s Answer

Google has spent many years building a tremendous distributed computer. When you request a site, their frontend servers use a deadline scheduler and request blocks from their advertising, personalization, search results and other page blocks. The page is then assembled and returned to the web surfer. If any block doesn’t complete quickly enough, it is left out from assembly – which motivates the advertising department to make sure their block renders quickly.

What else can we do?

* Reduce the number of calculations required to serve a page
* Reduce the number of disk operations
* Reduce the network Traffic

In general, do as few calculations as possible while handing the page to the surfer.

This post is a version of the slideshow presentation I did at Hack and Tell in Fort Lauderdale, Florida at The Whitetable Foundation on Saturday, June 4, 2011.

Briefly, I created a Plugin that enabled Fragment Caching with WordPress and Varnish. The problem we ran into with normal page caching methods was related to the fact that this particular client had people visiting many pages per visit, requiring the sidebar to be regenerated on uncached (cold) pages. By caching the sidebar and the page and assembling the page using Edge Side Includes, we can cache the sidebar which contains the most database intensive queries separately from the page. Thus, a visitor moving from one page to a cold page, only needs to wait for the page to generate and pull the sidebar from the cache.

What problem are we solving?

We had a high traffic site where surfers visited multiple pages, and, a very interactive site. Surfers left a lot of comments which meant we were constantly purging the page cache. This resulted in the sidebar having to be regenerated numerous times – even when it wasn’t truly necesssary.

What are our goals?

First, we want that Time to First Byte to be as quick as possible – surfers hate to wait and if you have a site that takes 12 seconds before they see any visible indication that there is something happening, most will leave.

We needed to keep the site interactive, which meant purging pages from cache when posts were made.

We had to have fast pageloads – accomplished by caching the static version of the page and doing as few calculations as possible to deliver the content.

We needed fast static content loading. Apache does very well, but, isn’t the fastest webserver out there.

How does the WordPress front page work?

The image above is a simple representation of a page that has a header, an article section where three articles are shown and a sidebar. Each of those elements is built from a number of SQL queries, assembled and displayed to the surfer. Each plugin that is used, especially filter plugins that look at content and modify it before output add a little latency – resulting in a slower page display.

How does an Article page work?

An article page works very similar to the frontpage except our content block now only contains the contents from one post. Sometimes additional plugins are called to display the post content dealing with comments, social media sharing icons, greetings based on where you’re visiting from (Google, Digg, Reddit, Facebook, etc) and many more. We also see the same sidebar on our site which contains the site navigation, advertisements and other content.

What Options do we Have?

There are a number of existing caching plugins that I have benchmarked in the past. Notably we have:

* WP-Varnish
* W3 Total Cache
* WP Super Cache
* WordPress-Varnish-ESI
* and many others

Page Caching

With Page Caching, you take the entire generated page and cache it either in ram or on disk. Since the page doesn’t need to be generated from the database, the static version of the page is served much more quickly.

Fragment Caching

With Fragment Caching, we’re able to cache the page and a smaller piece that is often repeated, but, perhaps doesn’t change as often as the page. When a websurfer comments on a post, the sidebar doesn’t need to be regenerated, but, the page does.

WordPress and Varnish

Varnish doesn’t deal well with cookies, and WordPress uses a lot of cookies to maintain information about the current web surfer. Some plugins also add their own cookies to track things so that their plugin works.

Varnish can do domain name normalization which may be desired or not. Many sites redirect the bare domain to the www.domain.com. If you do this, you can modify your Varnish Cache Language (VCL) to make sure it always hands back the proper host header.

There are other issues with Varnish that affect how well it caches. There are a number of situations where Varnish doesn’t work as you would expect, but, this can all be addressed with VCL.

Purging – caching is easy, purging is hard once you graduate beyond a single server setup.

WordPress and Varnish with ESI

In this case, our plugin caches the page and the sidebar separately, and allows Varnish to assemble the page prior to sending it to the server. This is going to be a little slower than page caching, but, in the long run, if you have a lot of page to page traffic, having that sidebar cached will make a significant impact.

Possible Solutions

You could hardcode templates and write modules to cache CPU or Database heavy widgets and in some cases, that is a good solution.

You could create a widget that handles the work to cache existing widgets. There is a plugin called Widget Cache, but, I didn’t find it to have much benefit when testing.

Many of the plugins could be rewritten to use client-side javascript. This way, caching would allow the javascript to be served and the actual computational work would be done on the client’s web browser.

Technical Problems

When the plugin was originally written, Varnish didn’t support compressing ESI assembled pages which resulted in a very difficult to manage infrastructure.

WordPress uses a lot of cookies which need to be dealt with very carefully in Varnish’s configuration.

What sort of Improvement?

Before the ESI Widget	After the ESI Widget
12 seconds time to first byte	.087 seconds time to first byte
.62 requests per second	567 requests per second
Huge number of elements	Moved some elements to a ‘CDN’ url

WordPress Plugin

In the above picture, we can see the ESI widget has been added to the sidebar, and we’ve added our desired widgets to the new ESI Widget Sidebar.

Varnish VCL – vcl_recv

sub vcl_recv {
    if (req.request == "BAN") {
       ban("req.http.host == " + req.http.host +
              "&& req.url == " + req.url);
       error 200 "Ban added";
    }
    if (req.url ~ "\.(gif|jpg|jpeg|swf|css|js|flv|mp3|mp4|pdf|ico|png)(\?.*|)$") {
      unset req.http.cookie;
      set req.url = regsub(req.url, "\?.*$", "");
    }
    If (!(req.url ~ "wp-(login|admin)")) {
      unset req.http.cookie;
    }
}

In vcl_recv, we set up rules to allow the plugin to purge content, we do a little manipulation to cache static assets and ignore some of the cache breaking arguments specified after the ? and we aggressively remove cookies.

Varnish VCL – vcl_fetch

sub vcl_fetch {
  if ( (!(req.url ~ "wp-(login|admin)")) || (req.request == "GET") ) {
                unset beresp.http.set-cookie;
  }
  set beresp.ttl = 12h;

  if (req.url ~ "\.(gif|jpg|jpeg|swf|css|js|flv|mp3|mp4|pdf|ico|png)(\?.*|)$") {
    set beresp.ttl = 365d;
  } else {
    set beresp.do_esi = true;
  }
}

Here, we remove cookies set by the backend. We set our timeout to 12 hours, overriding any expire time. Since the widget purges cached content, we can set this to a longer expiration time – eliminating additional CPU and database work. For static asset, we set a one year expiration time, and, if it isn’t a static asset, we parse it for ESI. The ESI parsing rule needs to be refined considerably as it currently parses objects that wouldn’t contain ESI.

Did Things Break?

Purging broke things and revealed a bug in PHP’s socket handling.

Posting Comments initially broke as a result of cookie handling that was a little too aggressive.

Certain plugins break that rely on being run on each pageload such as WP Greet Box and many of the Post Count and Statistics plugins.

Apache logs are rendered virtually useless since most of the queries are handled by Varnish and never hit the backend. You can log from varnishncsa, but, Google Analytics or some other webbug statistics program is a little easier to use.

End Result

Varnish 3.0, currently in beta, allows compression of ESI assembled pages, and, now can accept compressed content from the backend – allowing the Varnish server to exist at a remote location, possibly opening up avenues for companies to provide Varnish hosting in front of your WordPress site using this plugin.

Varnish ESI powered sites became much easier to deploy with 3.0. Before 2.0, you needed to run Varnish to do the ESI assembly, then, into some other server like Nginx to compress the page before sending it to the surfer, or, you would be stuck handing uncompressed pages to your surfers.

Other Improvements

* Minification/Combining Javascript and CSS
* Proper ordering of included static assets – i.e. include .css files before .js, use Async javascript includes.
* Spriting images – combining smaller images and using CSS to alter the display port resulting in one image being downloaded rather than a dozen tiny social media buttons.
* Inline CSS for images – if your images are small enough, they could be included inline in your CSS – saving an additional fetch for the web browser.
* Multiple sidebars – currently, the ESI widget only handles one sidebar.

How can I get the code?

http://code.google.com/p/wordpress-varnish-esi/

Long ago I wrote the WordPress ESI Widget to help a client’s site stay online during a barrage of traffic. To solve some of the performance problems on high traffic WordPress sites, you have to use caching, but almost all of the caching addons for WordPress do page level caching rather than fragment caching. After the site’s traffic slowed, I stopped development on the widget due to the infrastructure required to support compression.

To compress an ESI assembled page, one needed to run Nginx in front of Varnish and lost some performance as a result. Nginx would take the initial request, pass it to Varnish, Varnish would talk to the backend — which could be the same Nginx server in a somewhat complex configuration — grab the parts, assemble it, hand it back to Nginx which would then compress it and hand it to the surfer.

With Varnish compressing ESI assembled pages, we don’t need the incredibly complex configuration to run ESI. We’re left with a very simple front end cache in front of our backend servers.

Why is Fragment Caching important?

Fragment caching allows the cache to store pieces of the page that may repeat on several pages and assemble those pieces with the rest of the page. The sidebar on your WordPress site only needs to be generated once as someone surfs through your site. This changes the nature of WordPress caching considerably. Compared to the fastest existing WordPress caching plugin, the Varnish ESI widget doubled its performance – bested only by WP Varnish, a plugin that ran Varnish directly and managed cache expiration.

ESI explained simply is probably the best example I have ever found for explaining how ESI works.

But something else is faster

WP Varnish is currently faster, and, for all practical purposes probably always will be on a very busy site. However, on a site that gets a lot of traffic on one page, the second page time to first byte should be faster on an ESI assembled page because the sidebar which contains some of the most computationally expensive parts of the page, doesn’t need to be generated again. While we give up some of the raw speed, we gain an advantage when someone clicks through to read the second page. The perfect use case here is getting publicity for a particular post on your WordPress site, and those surfers decide to read other articles you’ve written.

Varnish’s Original Announcement

From: Poul-Henning Kamp
Date: January 25, 2011 6:04:02 AM EST
To: varnish-misc@varnish-cache.org
Subject: Please help break Varnish GZIP/ESI support before 3.0

One of the major features of Varnish 3.0 is now feature complete, and
I need people to start beating it up and help me find the bugs before
we go into the 3.0 release cycle.

GZIP support
------------

Varnish will ask the backend for gzip'ed objects by default and for
the minority of clients that do not grok that, ungzip during delivery.

If the backend can not or will not gzip the objects, varnish can be
told in VCL to gzip during fetch from the backend.  (It can also
gunzip, but I don't know why would you do that ?)

In addition to bandwidth, this should save varnish storage (one gzip
copy, rather than two copies, one gzip'ed one not).

GZIP support is on by default, but can be disabled with a parameter.

ESI support
-----------

Well, we have ESI support already, the difference is that it also
understands GZIP'ing.  This required a total rewrite of the ESI
parser, much improving the readability of it, I might add.

So now you can use ESI with compression, something that has hitherto
been a faustian bargain, often requiring an afterburner of some kind
to do the compression.

There are a lot of weird cornercases in this code, (such as including
a gzip'ed object in an uncomressed object) so this code really needs
beaten up.

Original message

What else is there?

Another very important fact is that Varnish will use gzip to request assets from the backend. While this doesn’t sound incredibly important, it is. Now, you can run a Varnish server at another data center and not worry as much about latency. Before this version, any ESI assembled page needed to be fetched uncompressed, and, large pages add tiny bits of latency which result in a poorer experience while surfing. Most installations run Varnish on the same machine or on a machine network topologically close, but, this opens the doors for a CDN to run ESI enabled edge servers to supercharge your WordPress site hosted anywhere.

When will it be here?

Varnish moves quickly, and while the changes are substantial in terms of code rewrites, their code is very well written. I don’t expect we’ll see many bugs in the code and it’ll be released in the next few months. This site and a number of other sites we work with will be running it later this week.

In short, caching for WordPress just got an incredible boost. Even before the compression and gzip request from the backend, the ESI Widget was twice as fast as the fastest non-Varnish enabled plugin and over 440 times faster than WordPress out of the box.

Original Info

* WordPress Cache Plugin Benchmarks
* WordPress, Varnish and Edge Side Includes
* ESI Widget Issues in the Varnish, ESI, WordPress experiment
* A WordPress Widget that Enables one to use Varnish and ESI

Today we had a DDOS attack on one of our clients. They were running prefork with mod_php5 with a rather busy application. While we initially started filtering IP addresses using iptables and a few crudely hacked rules, we knew something had to be done that was a little more permanent. Moving to MPM-Worker with PHP served with FastCGI seemed reasonable, but, looking at the history of the attacks on this machine, I believe Apache still would have been vulnerable since we cannot filter the requests early enough in Apache’s request handler.

Apache does have the ability to fight some DDOS attacks using mod_security and mod_evasive, but, this particular attack was designed to affect apache prior to the place where these modules hook into the request. This also precludes using fail2ban. We could run mod_forensic or mod_logio to assist fail2ban, but, it is still a stopgap measure.

We could have used some Snort rules and tied those to iptables, but, that is a rather bad solution to the problem.

While we could have used Varnish, their application would have had some issues. mod_rpaf can help by adjusting the REMOTE_ADDR to take the value from X-Forwarded-For that Varnish sets. mod_geoip actually inserts itself before mod_rpaf, so, we would have needed to make a modification to mod_geoip and recompiled it. I’m not sure how Varnish would have handled Slowloris and we had to fix this now.

Putting them behind a Layer 7 load balancer would have isolated the origin server and handled the brunt of the attack on the load balancer, but, again we would have needed mod_rpaf and some modifications to their code.

In the end, Lighttpd and Nginx appeared to be the only documented solution. After the conversion, we did find documentation that said Varnish and Squid were immune to Slowloris. With Nginx or Lighttpd, we didn’t have IP address issues to contend with, it would be easy enough to modify the fastcgi config to pass the GEOIP information in the same request variable that their application expected. We knew we had to run PHP under FastCGI, so, we might as well pick a tool where we can block the attack in the webserver without having to worry about firewall rules. We did put a few firewall rules in place to block the larger offenders.

in the http { } section of our nginx config, we added:

    client_body_timeout 10;
    client_header_timeout 10;
    keepalive_timeout 10;
    send_timeout 10;
    limit_zone limit_per_ip $binary_remote_addr 16m;

and in the server { } section, we added:

    limit_conn limit_per_ip 5;

Since each server was expecting to handle one or two requests from each IP, this gave us a little headroom while solving the problem in the right place.

I believe Varnish would have held the connection and wouldn’t have sent a request to the backend which makes it fairly versatile as a tool to deal with DDOS attacks. While I do like the ability to block certain requests in VCL, the methods listed to fight this type of attack appeared to favor a non-threaded webserver. Varnish in front of Apache would have worked, but, we already knew we needed to move from Apache at some point with this client and this gave us an opportunity to shift them while under the gun.

Wouldn’t have had it any other way.

A lot of time and effort goes into keeping a WordPress site alive when it starts to accumulate traffic. While not every site has the same goals, keeping a site responsive and online is the number one priority. When a surfer requests the page, it should load quickly and be responsive. Each addon handles caching a little differently and should be used in different cases.

For many sites, page caching will provide decent performance. Once your sites starts receiving comments, or people log in, many cache solutions cache too heavily or not enough. As many solutions as there are, it is obvious that WordPress underperforms in higher traffic situations.

The list of caching addons that we’re testing:

* DB Cache (version 0.6)
* DB Cache Reloaded (version 2.0.2)
* W3 Total Cache (version 0.8.5.1)
* WP Cache (version 2.1.2)
* WP Super Cache (version 0.9.9)
* WP Widget Cache (version 0.25.2)
* WP File Cache(version 1.2.5)
* WP Varnish (in beta)
* WP Varnish ESI Widget (in beta)

What are we testing?

* Frontpage hits
* httpload through a series of urls

We take two measurements. The cold start measurement is taken after any plugin cache has been cleared and Apache2 and MySQL have been restarted. A 30 second pause is inserted prior to starting the tests. We perform a frontpage hit 1000 times with 10 parallel connections. We then repeat that test after Apache2 and the caching solution have had time to cache that page. Afterwards, http_load requests a series of 30 URLs to simulate people surfing other pages. Between those two measurements, we should have a pretty good indicator of how well a site is going to perform in real life.

What does the Test Environment look like?

* Debian 3.1/Squeeze VPS
* Linux Kernel 2.6.33
* Single core of a Xen Virtualized Xeon X3220 (2.40ghz)
* 2gb RAM
* CoW file is written on a Raid-10 System using 4x1tb 7200RPM Drives
* Apache 2.2.14 mpm-prefork
* PHP 5.3.1
* WordPress Theme Test Data
* Tests are performed from a Quadcore Xeon machine connected via 1000 Base T on the same switch and /24 as the VPS machine

This setup is designed to replicate what most people might choose to host a reasonably popular wordpress site.

tl;dr Results

If you aren’t using Varnish in front of your web site, the clear winner is W3 Total Cache using Page Caching – Disk (Enhanced), Minify Caching – Alternative PHP Cache (APC), Database Caching – Alternative PHP Cache (APC).

If you can use Varnish, WP Varnish would be a very simple way to gain quite a bit of performance while maintaining interactivity. WP Varnish purges the cache when posts are made, allowing the site to be more dynamic and not suffer from the long cache delay before a page is updated.

W3 Total Cache has a number of options and sometimes settings can be quite detrimental to site performance. If you can’t use APC caching or Memcached for caching Database queries or Minification, turn both off. W3 Total Cache’s interface is overwhelming but the plugin author has indicated that he’ll be making a new ‘Wizard’ configuration menu in the next version along with Fragment Caching.

WP Super Cache isn’t too far behind and is also a reasonable alternative.

Either way, if you want your site to survive, you need to use a cache addon. Going from 2.5 requests per second to 800+ requests per second makes a considerable difference in the usability of your site for visitors. Logged in users and search engine bots still see uncached/live results, so, you don’t need to worry that your site won’t be indexed properly.

Results

Sorted in Ascending order in terms of higher overall performance

Addon	Apachebench	Cold Start Warm Start		http_load	Cold Start Warm Start
	Req/Second	Time/Request	50% within x ms	Fetches/Second	Min First Response	Avg First Response
Baseline	4.97	201.006	2004	15.1021	335.708	583.363
	5.00	200.089	2000	15.1712	304.446	583.684
DB Cache	4.80	208.436	2087	15.1021	335.708	583.363
Cached all SQL queries	4.81	207.776	2091	15.1712	304.446	583.684
DB Cache	4.87	205.250	2035	14.1992	302.335	621.092
Out of Box config	4.94	202.624	2026	14.432	114.983	618.434
WP File Cache	4.95	201.890	2009	15.8869	158.597	549.176
	4.99	200.211	2004	16.1758	99.728	544.107
DB Cache Reloaded	5.02	199.387	1983	15.0167	187.343	589.196
All SQL Queries Cached	5.03	200.089	1985	14.9233	150.145	586.443
DB Cache Reloaded	5.06	197.636	1968	14.9697	174.857	589.161
Out of Box config	5.08	196.980	1968	15.181	257.533	587.737
Widgetcache	6.667	149.903	1492	15.0264	245.332	602.039
	6.72	148.734	1487	15.1887	299.65	598.017
W3 Total Cache	153.45	65.167	60	133.1898	8.916	85.7177
DB Cache off, Page Caching with Memcached	169.46	59.011	57	188.4	9.107	50.142
W3 Total Cache	173.49	57.639	52	108.898	7.668	86.4077
DB Cache off, Minify Cache with Memcached	189.76	52.698	48	203.522	8.122	43.8795
W3 Total Cache	171.34	58.364	50	203.718	8.097	44.1234
DB Cache using Memcached	190.01	52.269	48	206.187	8.186	42.4438
W3 Total Cache	175.29	57.048	48	87.423	7.515	107.973
Out of Box config	191.15	52.314	47	204.387	8.288	43.217
W3 Total Cache	175.29	57.047	51	204.557	8.199	42.9365
Database Cache using APC	191.19	52.304	48	200.612	8.11	44.6691
W3 Total Cache	114.02	87.703	49	114.393	8.206	82.0678
Database Cache Disabled	191.76	52.150	49	203.781	8.095	42.558
W3 Total Cache	175.80	56.884	51	107.842	7.281	87.2761
Database Cache Disabled, Minify Cache using APC	192.01	52.082	50	205.66	8.244	43.1231
W3 Total Cache	104.90	95.325	51	123.041	7.868	74.5887
Database Cache Disabled, Page Caching using APC	197.55	50.620	46	210.445	7.907	41.4102
WP Super Cache	336.88	2.968	16	15.1021	335.708	583.363
Out of Box config, Half On	391.59	2.554	16	15.1712	304.446	583.684
WP Cache	161.63	6.187	12	15.1021	335.708	583.363
	482.29	20.735	11	15.1712	304.446	583.684
WP Super Cache	919.11	1.088	3	190.117	1.473	47.9367
Full on, Lockdown mode	965.69	1.036	3	975.979	1.455	9.67185
WP Super Cache	928.45	1.077	3	210.106	1.468	43.8167
Full on	970.45	1.030	3	969.256	1.488	9.78753
W3 Total Cache	1143.94	8.742	2	165.547	0.958	56.7702
Page Cache using Disk Enhanced	1222.16	8.182	3	1290.43	0.961	7.15632
W3 Total Cache	1153.50	8.669	3	165.725	0.916	56.5004
Page Caching – Disk Enhanced, Minify/Database using APC	1211.22	8.256	2	1305.94	0.948	6.97114
Varnish ESI	2304.18	0.434	4	349.351	0.221	28.1079
	2243.33	0.44689	4	4312.78	0.152	2.09931
WP Varnish	1683.89	0.594	3	369.543	0.155	26.8906
	3028.41	0.330	3	4318.48	0.148	2.15063

Test Script

#!/bin/sh

FETCHES=1000
PARALLEL=10

/usr/sbin/apache2ctl stop
/etc/init.d/mysql restart
apache2ctl start
echo Sleeping
sleep 30
time ( \
echo First Run; \
ab -n $FETCHES -c $PARALLEL http://example.com/; \
echo Second Run; \
ab -n $FETCHES -c $PARALLEL http://example.com/; \
\
echo First Run; \
./http_load -parallel $PARALLEL -fetches $FETCHES wordpresstest; \
echo Second Run; \
./http_load -parallel $PARALLEL -fetches $FETCHES wordpresstest; \
)

URL File for http_load

http://example.com/

http://example.com/2010/03/hello-world/

http://example.com/2008/09/layout-test/

http://example.com/2008/04/simple-gallery-test/

http://example.com/2007/12/category-name-clash/

http://example.com/2007/12/test-with-enclosures/

http://example.com/2007/11/block-quotes/

http://example.com/2007/11/many-categories/

http://example.com/2007/11/many-tags/

http://example.com/2007/11/tags-a-and-c/

http://example.com/2007/11/tags-b-and-c/

http://example.com/2007/11/tags-a-and-b/

http://example.com/2007/11/tag-c/

http://example.com/2007/11/tag-b/

http://example.com/2007/11/tag-a/

http://example.com/2007/09/tags-a-b-c/

http://example.com/2007/09/raw-html-code/

http://example.com/2007/09/simple-markup-test/

http://example.com/2007/09/embedded-video/

http://example.com/2007/09/contributor-post-approved/

http://example.com/2007/09/one-comment/

http://example.com/2007/09/no-comments/

http://example.com/2007/09/many-trackbacks/

http://example.com/2007/09/one-trackback/

http://example.com/2007/09/comment-test/

http://example.com/2007/09/a-post-with-multiple-pages/

http://example.com/2007/09/lorem-ipsum/

http://example.com/2007/09/cat-c/

http://example.com/2007/09/cat-b/

http://example.com/2007/09/cat-a/

http://example.com/2007/09/cats-a-and-c/