What has it started from? I've been working with my friend on a quite popular sport blog. I'm using Wordpress, which doesn't require too much care, is flexible etc. Unfortunately Wordpress with a few plugins can perform even 100 database queries - it can blow every server. There is, however, a blog engine which generates HTML files by default (MovableType) but when you have got a blog with hundreds of posts, even a small change can require to generate all the HTML files again...

Of course, there are caching plugins for Wordpress, such as: WP-Cache and WP-SuperCache but from my own experience I know that they are not able to deal with bigger traffic. They generate a lot of PHP files and cleaning them can consume many server resources. WP-Cache can even slow down your Wordpress!

WP-SuperCache is a bit better than mentioned earlier WP-Cache, because it generates HTML files for unlogged users, but problems from WP-Cache still remain.

So why wp-htmlcache is so special? The mechanism generates static HTML files that are served to all the users. It doesn't matter, if they've already posted comments on your blog or not. Through that simple solution our blog can deal with huge traffic (Digg effect won't be a problem anymore!).

Can we see any results? The answer is very simple ... just look below:

Before installing wp-htmlCache
Process               CPU seconds      user   machine   count  average
php5.cgi               12986.3400   99.997%   54.110%   60549    0.214

After installing wp-htmlCache
Process               CPU seconds      user   machine   count  average
php5.cgi                5144.7600   99.880%   21.437%   24263    0.212

As you can see, the server usage decreased by 50%! It's obvious that blog readers feel the difference, too. Every page loads faster than ever.

I'm currently testing it and removing all kinds of errors and bugs, but wp-htmlCache already relieves the server in a significant way. Soon our Wordpress plugin will see the daylight ;-). Keep fingers crossed!