I went to 3 meetups this week: Codepen.io, WPNYC, and Web Performance NY.

At two of them people mentioned Percona. So I thought I’d check it out. Digital Ocean has a great tutorial if you’d like to check it out: How To Install a Fresh Percona Server or Replace MySQL. I got stuck for a bit, but found a solution deep in the comments of a StackOverflow answer. It turns out that when I removed MySQL to install Percona it removed the php5-mysql module.

Before installing it commando on my personal site, I tried it first in my dev box at work and got a 5x improvement in speed.

This is not a scientific experiment, I implemented two other improvements as well:

• Switched from W3 Total Cache to WP Super Cache.
• Expanded my Digital Ocean instance as Percona recommends 1GB RAM.

Hope this helps you’re reading experience at my digital home.

Cheers!