WordPress users: CACHE!

For all my friends out there running WordPress weblogs, please consider installing the Super Cache plugin. A friend of mine runs a very popular website — 1000s of unique visitors a day — and on part of the site he has a WordPress weblog. Traffic hitting the front page was bringing the server to its knees. There were 50 Apache processes waiting on MySQL to do something. I tried changing the query cache size in MySQL and adding caching headers in Apache, plus random other things. Nothing seemed to help. Then I installed Super Cache. Even before I made it though the multi-step process to fully enable it, the server was recovering. Super Cache created a static copy of the front page for Apache to serve and that made all the difference. Makes me wonder why WordPress doesn’t create a static cache in the first place.