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WordPress AWS EFS

Basically, using a shared file system like Amazon EFS allows multiple nodes to have access to WordPress files at the same time.

This can significantly simplify the processes of scaling horizontally and updating your web site.

Today, let us see the advantages discussed by our Support Techs:

Understanding page load time

Amazon EFS provides a simple, scalable, fully manage elastic NFS file system for use with AWS Cloud services and on-premises resources.

It is built to scale on demand to petabytes without disrupting applications.

Growing and shrinking automatically as you add and remove files, eliminating the need to provision and manage capacity to accommodate growth.

Amazon EFS is a regional service, storing data within and across multiple Availability Zones for high availability and durability.

As for any network file system, there is an overhead associate with the network communications between the client and the server.

This overhead is proportionally larger when operating on small files from single thread applications.

Multi-threaded I/O and I/O on larger files can often pipeline, allowing any network latencies to amortize over a larger number of operations.

This diagram shows the different steps that must take for a page to load.

Latency impact

The time-to-first-byte (TTFB) metric is useful for measuring the results of each test.

When someone opens a website, the browser asks the server for information; this is known as a ‘GET’ request.

TTFB is the time it takes for a browser to receive the first byte from the web server.

OPcache to the rescue

Zend OPcache improves PHP performance by storing precompile script bytecode in shared memory.

Removing the need for PHP to load and parse scripts on each request.

This extension is bundle with PHP 5.5.0 and later, and is available in PECL for PHP versions 5.2, 5.3 and 5.4.

Static content caching

Basically, PHP renders dynamic pages while the web server facilitates access to them via HTTP(s).

A web server also provides access to static files like images, CSS, JavaScript, etc.

These files can serve directly from Amazon EFS, and the user will experience a low single-digit millisecond latency.

For web sites that have 100s of static files that are load sequentially, the sum of these latencies can increase page load times.

A solution to this problem is to cache static files somewhere, such as a CDN, like Amazon CloudFront, or local storage.

If you are using Apache you can look at the ‘mod_cache_disk’ module.

It implements a disk-base storage manager for mod_cache.

The way it works is that the headers and bodies of cached responses are stored separately on a location that you specify.

This configuration avoids a network round trip to the shared file system when requests are served from the cache.

Other performance tuning tips :

1. Firstly, add File Caching To Your EC2 Instance

2. Next, size Your Volume For AWS Burst Credits

3. Install memcached

4. Setup a CDN

5. Be Patient & Methodical When Migrating Files to an EFS

6. Disable Plugins That Cause Full File Scans

7. Monitor Your Page Performance

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Conclusion

Today, we saw assistance provided by our Support Engineers regarding WordPress AWS EFS