Once your wordpress blog starts getting traffic besides your mom and cousins you will likely have to start taking measures to reduce it’s cpu footprint.

Note: Some of these methods will work on a shared host without root access, but ssh is required for some methods, like installing memcached.

Step 1: Offload Images to Amazon S3

Images generally make up a large percentage of the total page load (up to 50%, see below). By using Amazon S3 as a CDN, you can save on bandwidth costs with your host and speed up your page load times significantly.

Graph taken from the YSlow firefox plugin, a great tool to help diagnose page load performance issues.

Costs for S3 are reasonable, but can add up if you are hosting large files. Below is a report of costs for the first 10 hours of a blog that I run. Most requests are for a single image (2k in size) loaded externally.

Tantan S3 is a great plugin for wordpress that links your Amazon S3 account to your wordpress blog. You can configure it such that your media uploads are sent to your S3 “bucket” on upload.

Another useful tool is S3Fox, a plugin for firefox that you can use to manage and sync files in your S3 account through your browser. You will need your S3 security credentials to set it up.

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Parkinson’s Law is the adage first articulated by Cyril Northcote Parkinson as the first sentence of a humorous essay published in The Economist in 1955:

Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion

In Software:

Software Bloat: Data expands to fill the space available for storage.

Example: Too many to list.

In Academics:

Student syndrome refers to the phenomenon that many people will start to fully apply themselves to a task just at the last possible moment before a deadline

Example: Cramming before a midterm.

In Business:

Expenditures rise to meet income and NO amount of computer automation will reduce the size of a bureaucracy.

Example: Australian Tax Office.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_Law