Till Krüss on Object Cache Pro, WordPress, plugins, testing, and performance — Post Status Draft 126

Back in August, I had a long conversation with Till Krüss (edited down to <60 minutes here) about his path into WordPress, Laravel, and performance. Till is the developer and owner of Object Cache Pro, "a business class Redis object cache backend for WordPress." OCP offers a unique and highly successful model for partnerships between a WordPress plugin product business and a valuable niche market: hosting companies and anyone running WordPress sites at scale. Nexcess is the latest host to adopt OCP, which they announced earlier this week.

Till’s particular niche is not for everyone, but some of his ideas and achievements are very portable. For one thing, what plugin owner has not felt the pain of an extraordinarily busy support forum? Till is up to (wait for it..) 5-10 minutes a day on support — which he aims to decrease. How? End-to-end unit testing to ensure the highest code quality. It’s an idea that needs to become a reality and a habit in the third-party WordPress product ecosystem, Till believes — and I think he’s right about that.

What plugin owner has not felt the pain of an extraordinarily busy support forum? Till is up to (wait for it..) 5-10 minutes a day on support — which he aims to decrease. How? End-to-end unit testing to ensure the highest code quality.

Performance optimization in general — and caching in particular — are possibly the oldest and most persistent hard problems for people running WordPress and similar applications at scale. Historically, performance has been a problem passed to the hosting industry by WordPress developers and users of too many plugins — or too many plugins that use too many server resources, especially as measured in database queries.

A large part of the challenges people have with WordPress in the wild have to do with plugins that have not been built and tested to perform at scale. There’s likely a lot of opportunity in aligning people on performance as a key, common interest. What people are these? Product, agency, and hosting companies in the WordPress space. And, as Till’s example shows, a small WordPress company, or company of one that wants to stay that way, still can thrive today.

🔗 Mentioned in the show:

• Till Krüss's Object Cache Pro is a (closed-source) commercial product that grew out of and exists alongside Redis Object Cache (100k+ installs on WordPress.org). ROC is a fork of an unmaintained precursor Erick Hitter and Eric Mann launched in 2014. Relay looks like it will be a successor to OCP capable of speeds up to 100 times faster than Redis. It's "a PHP extension that is both a Redis client and a shared in-memory cache."
• Felipe Elia recently wrote a great explainer on WordPress, Objecet Cache, and Redis.
• Do the_Woo recently recorded this amazing open discussion between
• Scaling WordPress (Post Status Draft #51) remains one of our all-time most listened to podcast episodes, from 2016. Brian Krogsgard and Joe Hoyle take a pretty comprehensive look at WordPress performance and caching, including Redis.
• Jon Christopher is trying a unique business strategy with his OrganizeWP plugin that suggests cooperative ways to win outside centralized markets.
• Kevin Ohashi's WP Performance Tester plugin will test your server's raw capacity and show you how it compares to the current industry average established by Kevin's testing at WP Hosting Benchmarks.
• Mark Jacquith's Cache Buddy (2015) "[m]inimizes the situations in which logged-in users appear logged-in to WordPress, which increases the cacheability of your site."
• Shaun Kester's Latency Tracker (2008) was a helpful diagnostic when pre-"Managed WordPress" hosts were struggling to keep up with the booming use (and abuse) of self-hosted WordPress and other PHP/MySQL-based publishing platforms.
• Paul Jarvis talks about his book, Company of One: Why Staying Small Is the Next Big Thing for Business, with Brian Clark at Unemployable.
• The WordPress Core Performance Team is dedicated to monitoring, enhancing, and promoting performance in WordPress core and its surrounding ecosystem. We build and manage the Performance Lab plugin, a collection of performance-related “feature projects” for WordPress core.

🐦 You can follow Post Status and our guests on Twitter:

• Till Krüss (Rhubarb Group)
• Dan Knauss (Editor, Post Status)
• Olivia Bisset (Intern, Post Status)

The Post Status Draft podcast is geared toward WordPress professionals, with interviews, news, and deep analysis. 📝

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