As I wrote about earlier, I spent the better part of the last couple of days trying out various tricks to soup-up WordPress websites. One of the things I managed to do was re-imagine the thumbnailer common to a good portion of those “premium themes”, to allow it to serve mostly-static content instead of relying on PHP all the time.
The results are pretty freakin’ awesome – based on some rough benchmarks I’m expecting somewhere between ten to fifty times as much users during load when it’s teamed up with nginx.
Of course it has some serious caveats, not entirely unlike the side effects of diet pills (pooing out fatty jelly isn’t entirely out of the question) and it’s rather annoying to have to edit your theme every time you want to change your look… but I think the results are worth it.
I’ve released the instructions for Super-caching TimThumb on Hungry Hacker, it’d be awesome if it were somehow rolled into the main script.