The only problem I have, which I haven’t solved is that I have been using Mint for two years, and all the historical data for visitors is only recorded with Mint. So unless I can transfer the data to my new monitoring system, I have to keep both running at the same time or no longer have comprehensive up-to-date historical stats.

Has anyone found a solution to this irritating problem?

You might also look into writing a simple little caching php script using output buffers. I made something like that before I started using WP cache, and i just modified the comment submit handler to also clear the caching system i wrote.

Finally, what about stored MySQL procedures? If you’re running the same queries for populating the homepage, archives, etc you might be able to shave a few ms using stored procs.

Great writeup, I learned quite a bit.

How does one go about measuring these times that you are talking about? I’d like to see what factors are influencing my loading. I use bluehost.

Side note: This post was killer.

PHP is so much faster that MySQL in processing time that it is fairly negligible, however it is always good to bypass extra code right?

Not always (is PHP so much faster than MySQL). In fact, since WordPress 2.1 and up have posts queries that remain static (WHERE post_status='publish' as opposed to the old WHERE post_date_gmt ), hosts who enable MySQL qcache will probably make PHP the bottleneck.

Things that can really kill you are (a) showing all your categories in the sidebar (particularly if you have a huge category tree), (b) listing recent posts (in a non-cached way), (c) poorly coded plugins that do a lot of pushups on every load when they could cache stuff and update when the info changes.