Getting Just A Bit More

[brian]

In my quest for performance... These are the top enhancements I've made recently:

1. New server: my host has KVM servers at a lower price than OpenVZ (what I had). In addition to saving money, I have increased memory, more storage, and a dedicated kernel (Open VZ shares kernels). More memory means better caching configurations, which equals faster sites.

2. Brotli with Cloudflare: I had used Brotli (better compression) on my site in the past. Once I moved to Cloudflare as a proxy, they only accepted gzip inbound (though they sent Brotli). Last year they added Brotli passthrough support. Now enabled here, it eliminates half of the compression steps before pages are delivered.

3. Redis usage increase: I changed default PHP sessions from files to Redis, reducing latency for some pages.

4. New weather data source: I moved to Open-Meteo. The data files are over 80% smaller, for faster loading of the weather forecast.

Researching these improvements, many ask "Why" if only to save a few milliseconds...
Small changes today are the building blocks for great achievement in the future.