Finally, MankinTrad is upgrading to version 5. While version 4 brings front-end improvement, version 5 is mostly backend. No new features, no new UI, just a faster website.

Wannabe sysadmin, keep reading on.

Server move

The website is now on a dedicated server, located somewhere in France. It’s faster, and can handle a lot more load.

Backend Code Rewrite

The 4 years old PHP code was rewrittend from scratch, to takes advantage of the newest technology (PHP5.4, APC, etc …). PHP code execution time gain is up to 60%.

Moving to Nginx

We ditched Apache for Nginx. It’s also the main cause of the code refactoring, since we lost the luxury of URL rewriting of .htaccess. Nginx load webpages 30% more faster than Apache.

Caching

Static resources all have an Expires date, and should be cached by your browser. Example. : When you read a chapter for the second time, all will be loaded from your browser cache, like you were browsing in offline mode. Very fast page, the lag you’ll see is because your computer can’t keep up 🙂

Varnish

The whole website is served directly from the server RAM. You can’t do more faster than that.