CPU Load

We’ll start with the most obvious cause of PC slowness – processor overload. As you’re reading this website, it’s got various bits of JavaScript running. Each time you load the page, the JavaScript is read as text, interpreted by your browser, passed to your operating system which loads system libraries and passes the data to your kernel – which works through the hardware drivers to actually run the program through your CPU. We get the convenience of being able to have a single script run on nearly every computer, but all that interpretation and data passing can really hammer down your system performance.

The most basic way to check your CPU load is with the command-line utility top. It contains a lot of information, but it really shines when trying to make comparisons between the CPU and RAM usage of various applications.

In that screenshot, you can see that top sorts the entries with the highest usage on top, so that you can see right away what’s using the most CPU or RAM, and the result is shown in percentages.

It’s worth noting that on a machine with multiple cores, it’s quite possible that the percentages top shows you will total up to more than 100% (ie, one core is 70% of max and another is 60%, top might show 130% usage).

RAM Usage

Next to CPU, your RAM (or lack thereof) is the mostly likely culprit of performance problems. Most MakeTechEasier readers are probably familiar with how RAM works, but here’s a quick primer for those who don’t.

Let’s say you’re at a library, and the new Larry Porter and the Prince of Bologna book is out. Normally, fantasy books are kept in the basement, but these books are hugely popular, so the library staff keeps a stack of them right at the front desk. This means that the library patrons can grab their book quickly and easily without going to the basement, it’s a win-win for everyone. That all sounds great, but you can’t do that with EVERY book in the library. Since the staff cannot keep a single convenient shelf for every book they have, most of them get kept in sections such as the basement.

That’s similar to how hard drives and RAM work. The hard drive, in this analogy, would be the basement shelves. It’s well suited to long-term, organized storage. The RAM is the smaller area by the front desk, and space specifically suited to hold the most needed items so that they can be retrieved quickly.

If you’ve got too much in your RAM (too many programs and services running) then the computer’s ability to retrieve the needed information can be drastically reduced. Suddenly it’s got to sort through a giant stack of stuff instead of just grabbing what it needs.

While it’s true that the free command will give you basic memory info, this is another case where top can come in very handy. Instead of simply showing “X mb free”, top will give you the detailed numbers, percentages, and swap usage information.

Take note of the swap usage information. On an average desktop, the percentage of used swap space should generally be very low. If it’s not, you may have to just go out and buy more RAM (or seriously reduce the amount of running programs.)

Overworked Hard Drive

Is your hard drive light constantly chugging along, yet you have no idea what it’s doing? Mysterious input/output can sure be a problem, so there is a top-like tool called iotop specifically meant to help diagnose this kind of problem.

It is not, however, built in to many distributions so you’ll likely have to install it separately. It should be available in your distro’s repositories, but if not you can download it here.

A normal, idle system should be mostly zeros across the board, sometimes with a few small bursts while data is being written, as in the screenshot below.

If however, you run a disk-intensive utility like find, you’ll see its name and throughput listed clearly in iotop.

Now, you can easily find out what program is using your I/O (in this case I ran “find / -name chicken”), who ran it, the speed the data is being read, and more.

GUI Tools

The author of this post chose command line tools to gather this information for two main reasons. First, CLI tools generally require fewer resources than GUI tools, and second, tools like top can be found in just about any Linux system, where as GUI tools can be hit-or-miss.

Many people do not like the command line, and there are several GUI tools to perform system monitoring, but this author recommends Gnome System Monitor. It’s already available on just about any Gnome-based distribution, and includes a lot of useful information including realtime graphs for CPU, memory, and network.

Conclusion

While there are many things that can potentially cause system slowness those three things (CPU, RAM, and disk I/O) are behind the vast majority of performance problems. Using the tools described here won’t solve your performance problem, but they’ll make the cause of the problem a whole lot easier to find.

Do you know that Google actually penalizes websites that are slow to load? If you want to get a good search engine ranking, one of the most important thing is to make sure your site load fast, blazingly fast!

If you are running WordPress, we have already mentioned several ways to polish up your site loading speed, including adding Google Analytics site speed tracking feature, lazy loading your images, using W3 Total Cache and minify the code.

One other way is to use CloudFlare as a proxy server.

CloudFlare acts as a proxy server that link between you and your readers. When your readers enter your site’s URL, the browser will first connect to CloudFlare, which will then detect their locations and load your site content from the server closest to the readers. This will ensure your reader get the fastest loading time and performance. Furthermore, CloudFlare caches your script, css and image files, so there is no wastage of bandwidth and server resources.

In addition, as a proxy server, CloudFlare can detect who is accessing your site and block threats and limit abusive bots and crawlers before they reach you. In other words, CloudFlare is able to increase your site security as well.

Configuring CloudFlare

Getting your site to run with CloudFlare is easy.

1. Go to CloudFlare.com and sign up for an account.

2. Next, enter your site’s domain name. Click “Add this domain”.

3. CloudFlare will then scan your DNS. It might take up to 2 minutes. Once the scanning is completed, click “Continue to Step 2″.

4. The next page displays a list of your site existing DNS record. Check to see if they are correct. If necessary, you can add in extra DNS record here. If everything is correct, scroll down to the end and click “I’m done checking my DNS records, continue”

5. CloudFlare will then register your DNS setting and configure itself to power your site. CloudFlare will also add a sub-domain (of the name “direct”) for you to access your server without passing through the CloudFlare network.

6. The last step is to update your domain with the new DNS setting. If you register your domain name via a domain registrar, you can login to your domain registrar account and change the DNS setting. If you got everything set up via your web-host, submit a ticket and get them to change the DNS setting for you.

That’s it. You are good to go.

This is loading speed of Make Tech Easier before and after implementing CloudFlare.

Before:

After:

There is a saving of 1.8 second, which translate to a 18.5% improvement.

The above results were taken from Pingdom. You should also test out your site loading speed before and after implementing CloudFlare too.

What’s next after configuring CloudFlare?

After you have set up CloudFlare, login to your CloudFlare account and go to the “Settings -> CloudFlare Settings” (the link is beside your website). Here is where you can configure the settings for CloudFlare. Some of the important settings include Security level, Caching level, customize the Challenge page, E-mail Address Obfuscation, IP Geolocation (useful if you are showing geolocation ads) and Hotlink Protection.

In addition, if you are using WordPress, install the CloudFlare plugin which can help you optimize your database and better protect your site from spammers.

Image credit: lrargerich

All blog owners will know that images play an important part in a blog post. In Make Tech Easier, we love to use plenty of screenshots to make the tutorial clearer and easier to understand. However, there is one problem with this. The more images you have, the slower the site loads and utilizes more bandwidth. In addition, as we have outsourced our images hosting to Amazon S3, the higher bandwidth also translates to higher cost.

A good solution to this is to load your images on demand, or what is most commonly known as lazy loading.

Lazy loader is a jQuery plugin that delays the loading of images in (long) web pages. Images outside of viewport (visible part of web page) wont be loaded until user scrolls to them. For sites that use plenty of images, lazy load can make the page loads faster and also help to reduce server load (and cost).

To avoid going into the technical detail, let us look at the (simplest) ways that you can integrate this into your WordPress blog.

1. jQuery Image Lazy Loader

Without a doubt, plugin is the way to simplify stuff in WordPress. jQuery Image Lazy Loader is one such plugin that integrate the lazy load feature into your site.

There are no configuration required. All you need to do is to install the plugin and activate it.

Once activated, the lazy load script will work on all pages of the site.

2. Lazy Loader

Lazy Loader is another plugin that integrates the lazy load feature into your site. The difference is, it is configurable. The Lazy Loader plugin is not available in the WordPress repository, so you have to go to the developer’s website and download it (which also means you won’t be able to install it directly from your WordPress dashboard).

Once you have downloaded, installed and activated it, you can go to “Settings -> Lazy Loader” section to configure the plugin.

Options available include inserting the lazy load script on all pages, home page, posts, pages, category etc. You can also set the threshold limit (the number of images to load below the viewport) to avoid a lag in the image loading.

Other options include the loading effects and using your own placeholder image.

Conclusion

Lazy loading is a good way to reduce your site bandwidth, improve the page’s loading time and overall performance. If you just want a plug and play solution, jQuery Image Lazy Loader is the one to go for. If you want to have more control, then the Lazy Loader plugin is a better choice.

Lastly, for those who are proficient enough, you may want to check out the lazy load project for deep integration into your site.

Image credit: takamorry

Game Booster v2 is another great software by IOBit (the same developer as the IOBit toolbox) and it is designed to help you optimize your PC for smoother, more responsive game-play.

Usage

The usage is extremely simple. Download and install the game booster software.

Launch the Game Booster application. You should see a big button that encourages you to “Slide to boost”. If you are not computer savvy, sliding the button is all (almost) you need to optimize your PC. As simple as that.

What this “Boost slider” does is to stop the services that are not essential to the operating of the system. At the bottom of the window, you can actually view the detail of the services that are going to be stopped.

Game Driver

If you are playing the latest 3D games in the market, more often than not, you will need the latest driver for your hardware (mainly graphics card and soundcard). Game Boosters came with a Game Driver feature that will scan your current hardware and see if the driver is up to date. If not, it provides you with options to download and install the latest driver.

Game Essential

There are some components/software that are important (or useful) to a gameplay, like the DirectX. The Game Essential section checks the web for updates and update your system accordingly.

Game Defrag

While you have heard a lot about defragging your computer, few have heard about the needs to defrag your games. The concept is similar. Game booster will scan the particular game for all its files location and determine if they are scattered all over the place.If yes, it will defrag your game and bring all the files together. Theoretically, when all the files are together, the system has an easier way locating them, and hence the less seek time is required.

System Tweaks

As the name implies, the System Tweaks deal with tweaks that optimize the System settings. There are two options: Default and Top Performance. Unlike the main section where it shows you a detail of the tweaks that it performs, there is no way to know what it going to do to your system, until after the tweaks are performed. Furthermore, the tweaks require you to reboot your system.

Game Tools

The Game tools section contains a series of shortcut links to the various hardware option page, like Mouse, Keyboard, Game controllers, etc.

Conclusion

In terms of usability and simplicity, Game Booster v2 is top notch. However, there is just so much that it can optimize your system. if your hardware is not up to the mark, no amount of software optimization can help you improve your gaming performance.

Why the need for a cache plugin?

Whenever you load a page on a WP site, the server has to first query the database for the relevant content, then format the content into html format before sending to the browser for you to see. This is fine if your site only have 10 or 20 visitors per day. However, if you are receiving ten of thousands of readers every day, your CPU workload will also increase exponentially, and eventually crashed. This is also why plenty of sites went down when their post reaches the front page of Digg (aka the Digg effect).

What a cache plugin does is to store the dynamically generated page in a static html format. Whenever a visitor visits your site, the static page is served to the visitors instead of fetching it from the database. In this case, it will relief the workload of your CPU.

W3 Total Cache: An all in one caching solution

W3TC is more than just a cache plugin. It is in fact a combination of various features to optimize your site.

There are 4 main aspect of W3 Total cache

• Page caching
• Database caching
• Minify scripts
• Content Delivery Network

Page Caching

This is the part where a static html version of your site is generated and shown to your visitors whenever they visit your site.

In the Settings, you can determine whether to cache pages for logged in users and the homepage. You can also configure the lifetime of the cache and the user agents of the browser. If you are using a mobile theme, you may want to add the mobile device’s user agent to the list so that the mobile theme (instead of the cached page) will be shown on the mobile devices.

Minify Your Script

Minifying your CSS and javascript is a great way to reduce the file size of your web page, which in turn reduces the loading time of your site. In the Settings page, you can configure W3TC to minify your HTML code, Javascript and CSS.

Database caching

To reduce the number of database query, W3TC caches the database query and keep it active for a period of time. During this period of time, all database queries will be loaded from the database cache, thus reducing the number of time the server has to go to the database to fetch the items. When the expiry time is reached, the plugin will re-cache the database queries.

Content Delivery Network

Unless you are seeing a lot of traffic, chances are, you won’t need to use a CDN. What a CDN does is to load your content (such as images, css, javascript files) from an external server closest to the visitor’s geographical location so as to achieve a faster loading of your content as well as reducing your server’s bandwidth.

W3TC works with several CDN company, including Amazon CloudFront, S3 and even your own FTP account. You can choose to load your wp-includes/files, active theme files and even minified CSS and JS files from your CDN. There are also options for you to configure which file types get uploaded to your CDN.

Checking out the performance of W3TC

Once you have installed and configured the plugin, you can log out of your dashboard and go to your site. Right click on the browser and select “View Source“. Scroll down to the bottom and you will see the W3TC message. This will give you a good idea of how fast your site is loading.

Alternatively, you can also carry out website speed test before and after you have implemented the plugin to see the differences.

Let us know in the comments if the W3TC plugin works well for you.

Image credit: gibb626

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To fix this fragmentation problem, we need to run the disk defragmentation application where it locates the various parts of a file and arranges them in running order. By default, Windows comes with its own set of defragment tool that anyone can use, but it suffers from some drawbacks such as inability to defragment a single selected file and ignores files that are smaller than 64 MB.

On the other hand, there is this effective utility named Auslogics Disk Defrag which lets you overcome all of this drawbacks. This useful Auslogics product comes with features like:

• able to defragment all drives at once.
• able to defragment a single file or folder.
• auto defragmentation in the background.
• wipes out all the free space so that no data can be restored.
• able to change the algorithm of defragmentation.
• schedule regular defragmentation session.
• compatible with Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7.

It also contains several advanced features like optimizing your hard drives for maximum performance and keeping the MFT feature zone clear.

How to use Auslogics Disk Defrag

One good thing about Auslogics Disk Defrag is that it is easy to use.

If you want to defragment a single or multiple drives simultaneously, simply select the drives you want to defragment and click on “Defrag” button.

Clicking on the arrow beside the Defrag button allows you to change the algorithm of the defragmentation process. Here you can chose to just analyze the disks or to defragment the selected drives. You can also chose “Defrag & Optimize” option where it tweak the system for best performance. This process is slower but more effective than just the “Defrag” method.

If you just want to defragment some specific files or folders, go to Action->Defrag File or Action->Defrag folder. You can then select the file or folder to defrag.

Another interesting feature about this software is that you can set the algorithm of the defragment process. One option is to remove the users’ temporary file before defragmentation. This can significantly reduce the defragmentation time. You can also set option not to defrag files bigger than a certain size. Moving the system file to the beginning of the disk can also help to increase your system speed.

You can also schedule the defragmentation process from the “Schedule” tab.

Auslogics Disk Defrag is free to download and use. For those who wanted more powerful software, you can also try the premium version – Auslogics BoostSpeed.

Does this software make your defragmentation process a whole lot easier? Hopefully your PC performs faster too.

1. Disable Unnecessary Visual Effects

• Right click on “Computer” in windows start menu and choose “Properties”.
• Click on “Advanced System Settings” at the left pane.
• Under the “Advanced” tab, click on “Settings” under “Performance” category. Select the “Custom:” option.
• Look through the list and uncheck the effects that you have no used for it. (Note: For optimum result, uncheck all the check box except the last four items). Click OK.
• Restart your computer.

You will notice the result immediately.

2.Increase the Boot Speed

With this small tweak, you can decrease the boot time of your Windows 7.

• Press Windows Key + R to launch the Run window.
• Type “msconfig” and hit Enter. The System Configuration Window will appear.
• Under the “Boot” tab, find the box (on the right side) labeled with “Time out”. Generally it is set to 30.
• If you are using only one operating system then you can set the value as 0. But if you are using more than one, then set to 3.
• Check “No GUI Boot” option.

• Click the “Advanced Options” button.
• Check the box labeled with “Number of Processor” and select the number of processors in your computer. Most probably it will be 2.

• Now click “OK”.
• Click “Apply” and then “OK”.

Note: The above tricks will work only If you are using multi-core (more than one) processor in your computer.

3: Disable Windows Aero theme

Windows Aero theme is the eye candy in Windows Vista/7. While its performance was greatly improved in Win 7 as compared to Vista, it is still taking up a large amount of memory and squeezes the graphics card to its maximum. If you can live without the eye candy, then it is a great choice to disable it.

• Right click on the desktop and select “Personalize” .
• Chose One of the standard themes from the right hand side. “Windows 7 Basic” is a good choice.

4. Remove unwanted items from startup menu

Some of the applications that you have installed are automatically added tn the startup menu without your knowledge. If you are wondering why your Windows take so long to startup, they are mainly the culprit. The best way to fix this is to remove the unwanted programs and services from the startup menu.

• Press Windows Key + R and type “msconfig” in the run dialogue box.
• Go to the Startup tab. Uncheck the applications that you have no use for. (Make sure you do not remove any system services).

5.Use your USB flash drive as RAM

In Windows 7, there is this awesome and useful feature that allows you to use your USB flash drive as an external RAM.

Before you start, make sure that you are using a freshly formatted USB drive.

• plug in your USB drive. Right click on the USB drive in My Computer window and select Property.
• Under “Ready Boost” tab, check the box “Use this device”.
• Configure the space of your USB flash drive that you want to allocate for system speed.

6. Disable unnecessary system sounds

When it is active, the system sound can take up a lot of system resources and slow down the computer.

• Press Windows Key + R to open the Run window. Type “mmsys.cpl” and hit Enter.
• Go to the Sound tab. Select “No Sounds” from the Sound Scheme dropdown box.

Note: You can still keep some of your favorite sounds, but you must disable the Shutdown, Start up, Logoff, Start navigation and Logon sound for the best performance.

If you know of any more ways to speed up Windows 7, do let me know in the comments.

Here are 8 ways that you can use to improve your site loading time.

1. Reduce the number of images and image size in your site

Images take up a lot of bandwidth and can slow down the page’s loading time to a great extent. One of the best way to reduce loading time is to reduce the number of images in your site.

There are main two types of images that most WordPress blogs contain: theme images and post images. Theme images are those images that are used in the theme. These can be the header images, the small bullet images you use for any list, the small icon beside the comment link and many more. If you are not the designer of your theme and you know nuts about coding, there is really nothing much that you can do. You can either live with it or change your current theme to one that uses lesser images. For those with some coding knowledge, you can use CSS Sprite to combine several images into one big image and use CSS background-position to shift the image around (more detail here).

Post images are images that you inserted into your posts to illustrate your points or to beautify the post. If possible, reduce the number of images used in the post (not more than 5). If your site is a tutorial blog that uses plenty of screenshots to get your points across (just like Make Tech Easier), the best way out is to optimize and compress the images before posting them in your site. Adobe Photoshop has this “Save for Web” function that you can use to optimize/compress your images easily. Most free image editors (such as GIMP) also provide you with the option to compress your images. Online tools such as online image optimizer and JPEGWizard are also great tools you can use to reduce the filesize of your images.

2. Split up long post into multiple short pages

If you are in the habit of writing long posts (more than 1500 words), it is best to split the post into several small pages. Not only does it leads to a faster loading page, it is also easier for your visitors to read and digest. In WordPress, you can easily split your post with the  <!--nextpage--> tag. Read here for more detail.

3. Upgrade to the latest version of WordPress and plugins

It is important that you update your WordPress and all your plugins to the latest version. The WordPress team is working hard to make sure that every release of WordPress has a better performance than the previous version. The only way for you to make use of their effort is to follow the development cycle closely and update whenever a newer version is available.

4. Deactivate unused plugins

Most of the plugins introduce extra javascript and css file to your site and choke up your bandwidth. If you have no use for any of the plugins, make sure you deactivate them and get rid of those miscellaneous javascript and css. You’ll be surprised how much faster your site will load when these unused plugins are not around.

In addition, check out your existing list of active plugins and see if any of those have overlapping features with the latest version of WordPress. For example, prior to WP2.7, I used the Admin Management Xtended plugin to better manage all the administrative tasks. With the release of WP2.7, most of the features in the plugin are integrated into the software itself, which means I can now retire the plugin and free up the valuable resources.

You may also want to check out the WordPress plugin repository regularly for any other plugins that can do the same function as your existing plugins, but have better performance.

5.  Install WP-SuperCache

If there is one plugin that you must keep, it have to be WP-SuperCache. The SuperCache plugin caches your page as a static html file. When your visitors arrive at your site, they will be served the static page instead of the actual page.

If your Web host can support compressed file, you can further improve your site loading time simply by checking the Enable Compression feature within the SuperCache option page. When this option is turned on, the static html will be compressed as a gzip file, making the filesize even smaller.

(Note that the compression feature might not work for everyone. Some have reported problems with different browsers. Please test it thoroughly before using it live)

6. Streamlining your theme

Your theme (especially header.php and footer.php) contains a lot of redundant dynamic content that can easily take up valuable server resources. You can easily streamline it to reduce the number of php and database queries.

Here is an example of how you can streamline your code. Log in to your Admin dashboard. Go to the theme editor section and load up the Header file. You should see something like this (without the color coding):

(Screenshot taken from classic theme header.php in a html editor. Depending on the theme that you are using, result may vary.)

Here is how I change some of the dynamic content (<?php …. ?> tag) into strings of text. Also, look how I have reduce the number of items in the header file.

By streamlining your theme, the site won’t have to keep going back to the server to query the database, thus the time taken to load will also be faster.

7. Add Expires header to static resources

One of the great way to improve your site loading time is to add an Expires header to all your static resources (such as css file, javascript, images etc).  An Expires header is a way to specify a time far enough in the future so that the clients (browsers) don’t have to re-fetch any static content. Here is an example of how you can add Expires header to all your images.

Download your .htaccess file from your server.

Add the following lines to the file:

ExpiresActive On
ExpiresByType image/gif A2592000
ExpiresByType image/png AA2592000
ExpiresByType image/jpg AA2592000
ExpiresByType image/jpeg AA2592000

The A2592000 means that the cache file will expire one month (in seconds) from the time the visitor first visits your site.

8. Install php_speedy

From the above, you can see that I did not mention anything about compressing and minify your CSS and javascript files. That is because php_speedy has all of them covered.

PHP Speedy is a WordPress plugin that optimizes your site and reduces the loading time of all your pages greatly. What it does is to compress and minify all your CSS and javascript files, set expiration-header for CSS and JS file, streamline the html tag and cache it in the server for quick loading.

What other ways do you use to improve your site’s loading time?

Image credit: Purplemattfish