Over the years I’ve tried a few different strategies to help with performance: more RAM, faster hardware, and a couple of different caching extensions. The most recent improvements came from a combination of running WordPress in Docker on a diskless RancherOS machine, together with one of the more popular caching extensions.

This was good enough, but I wasn’t happy. The extension was complex both in terms of implementation and configuration. This seemed unnecessary; I set about looking for simpler alternatives, eventually settling on using a redis cache.

Redis has several advantages in a Docker-based environment:

• It’s trivially easy to add a redis server;
• It’s easy to configure WordPress to use it, using Redis Object Cache; and
• It’s fast. Very fast.

I haven’t made any attempt to run benchmarks, but so far it seems to provide a performance boost similar to the old, complex extension – without all the overhead. And that, I think, is a good thing.