So for those that have been wondering, what is it that is actually happening, why the change, why the downtime and why the urge to get better performance?
The main reason is TTFB (Time To First Byte) and page load (full) - the principle behind this, is the faster a site loads, the better the overall experience to the end user (you and me). So this is the snapshot of the move to the new server, indicating page load.
What are we looking at?
In the snapshot above, you will ratings in the top left, A, for example is good, C is average and X is not not being used at all. We are scoring well for everything apart from caching static content (which we are using, but only Zend Op Cache, we will be utilising Memcache again and we will be using CDN (Content Delivery Network via cloudfare) again.
However, this is about bench marking without using the additional items.
As you can tell, the first byte is now looking good, I want it to be better and that requires additional optimisation in different settings, specifically optimising how the database performs and utilises the memory available correctly.
We need to reduce the page size on initial load, as it's loading at 1MB and I want to reduce this by 50% (if possible and without affecting the overall look). I want to reduce the amount of requests on the initial load as well, currently it's sitting at roughly 71, I want to get that down to between 30/40 request, the less requests the better.
What we also want to do is make the site snappier, i.e. click a link and within a second the page load happens and you can start reading the next page/topic. Our limitation is the server and the amount of processing cores available and memory available. As we are on a VPS (Virtual Private Server) we are basically on shared hosting / the big difference is a VPS is effectively a dedicated server within a shared hosting enviroment.
What we want and it will happen in the future, is a dedicated server - where all the processing power and memory is available to us and us alone. However, dedicated servers cost a bit more money that VPS (roughly $100 more expensive per month).
However, we are heading in the right direction and moving the site to the new VPS package running on a 64 bit OS which allows us to better utilise waht we have, has been as step in the right direction. Over the coming days and weeks, I will be doing more optimising but this won't affect site uptime (unless I need to borrow the lead for the kettle).