Having spent almost two and a half years On this project it was a great sense of achievement to finally have some pupils using the blog server. It also, was not without it’s hiccups. Th Blog Server was used by two classes in this school the first a colleague of mine allowed a small group of his pupils use it. His only response was that whilst it worked it was a bit slow.

Not completely unsurprising as the hardware was an old computer with 512 Mb Ram, an Intel Celeron D Processor and two 80Gb hard disks. Whoo-whee!!! Not exactly bursting with lots of power but it’s a start. Anyway, it was struggling to allow the pupils to access the dashboard simultaneously so I’m currently taking a two pronged approach to solve these issues. First, I’m looking for a better box, a proper server and one will come my way in due course. Second, I’m looking for optimisations which can be implemented on the server.

Optimisations

There are two optimisations which can help improve the performance of the blog server. Caching the PHP pages generated from WordPress and cache the database queries. Both these optimisations save processor operations and can speed up the web server’s responses to the users.

There are a number of WordPress plugins which can be used to cache these pages. I’ve tried WP Super Cache and WP optimisation. Plus others which I’ll post later.

The latest test with 7 users worked well and fairly fast. The educational benefits are starting to become evident following this test of this one fact I remain pleased and positive.

Optimisation of the Blog Server – 9/6/11 19:55 (Blog server, multisite, mysql, optimisation, php, testing, wordpress)

Ok, so the story so far…

I’ve built the blog server, it is now installed on the network and this involved routing the blog server to look through the network’s proxy server. The problem with trying to achieve this is understanding the nature ofna network which is not your own. I found various articles here but configuring the network was a bit tricky.

Here are the articles which I used for advice
article 1
article 2
etc

I also created a plain HTML file which was very useful it had embedded content for YouTube as this would prove if the problem resided with my WordPress installation. This indeed prove to be a master stroke on my part. As indeed I did have an issue with the wordpress setup. There seem to be a myriad of hidden options which can be added to the wp-config.php file and some of these do the trick!