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.