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speed

Is OSX Mojave on a 2014 MacBook Pro slower or faster than High Sierra

October 1, 2018 by Simon

This is a quick post to see if OSX Mojave runs slower on a Mid 2014 Mac Book Pro than High Sierra

Aside

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Now on with the post.

New Mac Operating System (Mojave)

I have always been hesitant before upgrading to a new Apple operating system (or performance-impacting patch).

My Mid-2012 Macbook will not be able to install the next 2019 operating system (as it is now considered too old).

MacBook Thermal Cooling

My MacBook is already running at the limit of the stock thermal cooler (read more here). I replaced the thermal paste on my Mid-2012 Mac Book to help lower thermal temps. I often run fans at 100% with TG Pro.

Stock MacBook thermal paste (needs replacing).

Stock Paste

OSX Mojave

What’s new in OSX Mojave: https://help.apple.com/macOS/mojave/whats-new/

  • Dark Mode
  • Folder Stacks
  • Finder Enhancements
  • Quick Look Enhancements
  • New Screen gran
  • iOS to Mac camera.
  • New News App
  • Stocks App
  • Voice Memos
  • Home Control
  • Better Safari Privacy and Security
  • New Mac App Store
  • Take the tour

I currently have High Sierra Installed.

High Sierra About Screen

High Sierra – Black Magic Disk Speed Test 3.1 Speed Test Results

Write:  340.5 MB/s

Read:  348.1 MB/s

Hig Sierra Disk Benchmark

High Sierra – Novabench 4.01 Benchmark Scores

GPU: 0 (known issue)

RAM: 136

GPU: 243

DISK: 57

High Sierra Nova Bench

Downloading Mojave

Mojave is available for download in the App Store.

Download Mojave

Instaling Mojave

A quick wizard and Mojave in ready to install.

Download Mojave

Installation took about 2 hours to install over High Sierra.

OSX Mojave About Screen

Mojave Dark Mode

Dark mode is certainly very pretty, all stock apps on OSX are not optionally available in dark colour themes.

OSX Mojave dark mode

Mojave – Black Magic Disk Speed Test 3.1 Speed Test Results

Write:  348.5 MB/s (8MB/s faster than High Sierra)

Read:  348.1 MB/s (27.1MB/s faster than High Sierra)

Nice

FYI, The first 2 days of Mojave did seem a bit sower but this may because of background indexing.

My home MacBook has a 512GB Apple SSD hard drive. I recently upgraded to Mojave on a 2014 27 iMac that had a Hybrid SSD (128GB SSD + 1TB drive) and it runs really slowly.

High Sierra – Novabench 4.01 Benchmark Scores

GPU: 0 (known issue)

RAM: 136 (same as High Sierra)

GPU:251 (8 higher than High Sierra)

DISK: 57 (same as High Sierra)

Nova Bench on Mojave

Reboot Time in seconds (time taken to reboot and log back into an interactive desktop)

WOW: Reboot average times were 212 seconds in High Sierra but only 124 seconds in Mojave, that’s an 88-second improvement.

Mojave faster reboots

That totally made upgrading to Mojave worth it.

Screen Capture and save speed

Often I screenshot the desktop (or apps), Below is a time in seconds to capture the desktop and open the file in Photoshop on High Sierra and Mojave.

Capture Desktop Speed

Mojave is a lot faster (even with a wait for the file to be saved to the desktop)

IntelliJ

Does Mojave make IntelliJ slower?

Note: Sorry, the scale in the chart zoomed in by default, I am not sure how to reset the scale on the left to starts at 0.

Time to open IntelliJ

4-second improvement. Nice.

Time to opening Adobe CS Premiere Pro in Mojave v High Sierra

How does Adobe Premiere Pro handle Mojave?

Note: Sorry, the scale in the chart zoomed in by default, I am not sure how to reset the scale on the left to starts at 0.

Mojave Opening Premiere Pro

2 seconds slower (I expect updated from Adobe soon)

More to come soon.

I hope this guide helps someone.

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Revision History

v1.0 Initial Post

Filed Under: Apple, High Sierra, Mojave, OS, OSX Tagged With: faster, Installing, mojave, or, OSX, slower, speed

Using Cloudflare DNS servers to speed up the internet and add privacy on OSX

April 2, 2018 by Simon

Below is how I setup my OSX to use Cloudflare’s new DNS servers to speed up internet browsing and add privacy on OSX

Cloudflare has launched a DNS service: https://blog.cloudflare.com/announcing-1111/

DNS Performance

You can view worldwide DNS performance by viewing https://www.dnsperf.com/#!dns-providers

DNS Performance

I check the DNS at my router, I am using ISP provided DNS servers.

Review DNS

Cloudflare DNS

On April Fools 2018 Cloudflare Released a DNS server service.

Snip from here: “DNS: Internet’s Directory Nearly everything on the Internet starts with a DNS request. DNS is the Internet’s directory. Click on a link, open an app, send an email and the first thing your device does is ask the directory: Where can I find this? Unfortunately, by default, DNS is usually slow and insecure. Your ISP, and anyone else listening in on the Internet, can see every site you visit and every app you use — even if their content is encrypted. Creepily, some DNS providers sell data about your Internet activity or use it target you with ads.”

https://1.1.1.1/

Set Cloudflare Nameservers using OSX

Open the Apple System Preferences, click Network, click on your Network (Wifi or ethernet), Click Advanced then DNS and add 1.1.1.1 and 1.0.0.1

Alternatively, you can manually set your DNS servers in OSX by editing the /etc/resolv.conf, by default SX will inherit DNS settings from our router.

cat /etc/resolv.conf
#
# macOS Notice
#
# This file is not consulted for DNS hostname resolution, address
# resolution, or the DNS query routing mechanism used by most
# processes on this system.
#
# To view the DNS configuration used by this system, use:
#   scutil --dns
#
# SEE ALSO
#   dns-sd(1), scutil(8)
#
# This file is automatically generated.
#
domain home
nameserver 1.1.1.1
nameserver 1.0.0.1

Troubleshooting: Clear DNS Cache

sudo killall -HUP mDNSResponder

Debug DNS Data

scutil --dns
DNS configuration

resolver #1
  search domain[0] : home
  nameserver[0] : 1.1.1.1
  nameserver[1] : 1.0.0.1
  flags    : Request A records
  reach    : 0x00000002 (Reachable)

resolver #2
  domain   : local
  options  : mdns
  timeout  : 5
  flags    : Request A records
  reach    : 0x00000000 (Not Reachable)
  order    : 300000

resolver #3
  domain   : 254.169.in-addr.arpa
  options  : mdns
  timeout  : 5
  flags    : Request A records
  reach    : 0x00000000 (Not Reachable)
  order    : 300200

resolver #4
  domain   : 8.e.f.ip6.arpa
  options  : mdns
  timeout  : 5
  flags    : Request A records
  reach    : 0x00000000 (Not Reachable)
  order    : 300400

resolver #5
  domain   : 9.e.f.ip6.arpa
  options  : mdns
  timeout  : 5
  flags    : Request A records
  reach    : 0x00000000 (Not Reachable)
  order    : 300600

resolver #6
  domain   : a.e.f.ip6.arpa
  options  : mdns
  timeout  : 5
  flags    : Request A records
  reach    : 0x00000000 (Not Reachable)
  order    : 300800

resolver #7
  domain   : b.e.f.ip6.arpa
  options  : mdns
  timeout  : 5
  flags    : Request A records
  reach    : 0x00000000 (Not Reachable)
  order    : 301000

DNS configuration (for scoped queries)

resolver #1
  search domain[0] : home
  nameserver[0] : 1.1.1.1
  nameserver[1] : 1.0.0.1
  if_index : 7 (en0)
  flags    : Scoped, Request A records
  reach    : 0x00000002 (Reachable)

Confirm Cloudflare DNS from the OSX Comand line

nslookup www.fearby.com
Server:		1.1.1.1
Address:	1.1.1.1#53

Non-authoritative answer:
Name:	www.fearby.com
Address: 104.27.154.69
Name:	www.fearby.com
Address: 104.27.155.69

Privacy

I am not sure if Cloudflare is any more private than using ISP DNS but I’ll happily use it.

Several people have asked me about Cloudflare’s new 1.1.1.1 privacy DNS service. To be clear: it DOES NOT stop your ISPs from collecting your browsing history. ISPs can still see the sites you’re connecting to — even if the site is over HTTPS. You will still send a hostname.

— Zack Whittaker (@zackwhittaker) April 2, 2018

Speed

I can’t tell if DNS is faster, I did ping my ISP DNS before switching and it was about the same (sub 25ms), time will tell.

Conclusion

I have used https://www.opendns.com/ before and loved the dashboards, I hope Cloudflare add dashboard options too.

I hope this guide helps someone.

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Revision History

v1.0 Initial post

Filed Under: DNS Tagged With: add, and, Cloudflare, DNS, internet, on, OSX, privacy, servers, speed, the, to, up, Using

OSX speed tested before applying Spectre and Meltdown patches in 10.13.2

January 16, 2018 by Simon

Below is a quick post of how OSX speed fairs before and after application of the OSX 10.13.2 update (that fixed Spectre and Meltdown CPU issues).

I read of up to 30% speed drops with Redis after Spectre and Meltdown patches and was curious how OSX faired.

Here’s what happened last night to one of our busier redis servers before and after patching for meltdown. Using the same 200k/12 minute axes on both: down from ~145k ops/sec to ~95ks ops/sec, or about 35% slower. pic.twitter.com/H6sM0C5i1V

— Nick Craver (@Nick_Craver) January 12, 2018

News

Apple Confirms ‘Meltdown’ and ‘Spectre’ Vulnerabilities Impact All Macs and iOS Devices, Some Fixes Already Released [Updated]

MacOS High Sierra 10.13.2 Update Released with Bug Fixes 

Patches

macOS High Sierra 10.13.2 Combo Update + Supplement Update

Benchmarks (before applying patches)

Here are Cinebench R15 benchmarks on OSX 10.13.1 before upgrading to 10.13.2 on a 2-year-old  core i5 based iMac.

High Sierra 10.13.1, Cinebench R15 and TG Pro running in the background.

osx-speculative-001-before-cinebench-cpu

CPU: 490 cb points.

Now time to test the GPU in Cinebench…
osx-speculative-002-before-cinebench-cpu-gpu

GPU: 79.33 fps.

Now time to run a Geekbench CPU benchmark.

Here is a breakdown of the scores (2 mins after a fresh reboot and the best of three runs).
osx-speculative-003-before-geekbench-simple

Geekbench Single-Core Score: 4433

Geekbench Multi-Core Score: 13,005

Here is a breakdown of advanced GeekBench tests…
osx-speculative-004-before-geekbench-detailed

I tried to update to 10.3.2 via the software updates but my network was having troubles (human error, my firewall was too aggressive)
osx-speculative-005-update-failed

I downloaded the manual 10.13.2 update from Apple (not realising my firewall was blocking the app updates (I blocked app updated as soon as spectre news hit so I could write this post)).

I downloaded and opened the 2.8GB 10.13.2 update.
osx-speculative-006-manual-update-002osx-speculative-006-manual-update-001

PKG was extracted from the DMG.

osx-speculative-006-manual-update-003

10.13.2 Installation Wizard.

osx-speculative-006-manual-update-004

I solved my networking issues (disable my firewall) and was able to verify the installation of the 10.13.2 patch and download further 10.13.2 supplemental updates.
osx-speculative-006-manual-update-005

I verified all 10.13.2 updates were downloaded and installed and rebooted three times.
osx-speculative-006-manual-update-006

2 Minutes after a reboot I ran the same Cinebench R15 CPU benchmark.
osx-speculative-007-after-cinebench-cpu

CPU: 484 cb 

osx-speculative-008-after-cinebench-cpu-gpu

Cinebench R15 CPU dropped  about 6 points (about a 1.22448979591837% drop, not massive)

osx-speculative-009-after-geekbench-simpleb

Geek bench Single CPU scores fell from 4433 to 4194 (about 5.436498984886081% slower, not as bad as I expected).

osx-speculative-009-after-geekbench-advanced

Geek Bench Multi CPU scores fell from 13,005 to 12,868 (about 1.053440984236832% slower, not as bad as I expected).

Versions of Software

Cinebench R15

osx-speculative-010-after-cinebench-about

Geek Bench

osx-speculative-010-after-geekbench-about

Results

Cinebench CPU

Graphs are unfortunately zoomed in (I could not find out how to tell Excel to zoom out).  I will update when I find out how to zoom out results.

Green/Left = OSX 10.3.1.

Blue/Right = OSX 10.3.2 (post Spectre/Meltdown Patch).

osx-speculative-011-cinebench-results-cpu

Cinebench GPU

Green/Left = OSX 10.3.1.

Blue/Right = OSX 10.3.2 (post Spectre/Meltdown Patch).

osx-speculative-012-cinebench-results-gpu

Geekbench Single CPU

Green/Left = OSX 10.3.1.

Blue/Right = OSX 10.3.2 (post Spectre/Meltdown Patch).

osx-speculative-013-geekbench-results-single-cpu

Geekbench Multi CPU

Green/Left = OSX 10.3.1.

Blue/Right = OSX 10.3.2 (pst Spectre/Meltdown Patch.

osx-speculative-014-geekbench-results-multi-cpu

Geekbench Other

Green= OSX 10.3.1.

Blue = OSX 10.3.2 (post Spectre/Meltdown Patch).

Note: Most results were slightly slower but some were faster post patch.

osx-speculative-015-geekbench-results-detailed

Conclusion

It looks like performance falls 1-5% on a 2 year old system, not as bad as I was expecting.

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Revision History
v1.0 Initial Draft

Hope this helps someone.

Filed Under: Speed Tagged With: 10.13.2, and, applying, before, in, Meltdown, OSX, patches, Spectre, speed, tested

Improving the speed of WordPress

September 22, 2017 by Simon

This post shows my never-ending quest to speed up WordPress for free.

I have used to use WP Total Cache in the past but decided to check out what others recommended, I found this post 6 Best WordPress Caching Plugins Compared. Some WordPress Caching Plugins.

  • W3 Total cache
  • WP Fastest Cache
  • Cache Enable
  • WP Rocket
  • WP Super Cache
  • Etc

What plugin do I use?

Benchmark (No Caching Plugin)

I tested my site before installing a caching plugin with https://www.webpagetest.org/ and my site was loading in 21s (loading over 141 files).

My site loaded in a terrible 21.3 seconds. My blog is hosted on Jumba (Net Registry) on and Ultimate plan for $25 a month.

My site seems to deliver 70% images so I wonder if a page caching plugin can help?

I do run the EWWW Image Optimizer plugin to automatically compress images when I upload them to my site. Read my blog post on the EWWW Image Optimizer here.  I do keep images at a high quality to capture all details.

WP Fastest Cache Plugin

I have decided to try the WP Fastest Cache because it’s source was updated 4 hours ago compared to WP Super Cahches update 5 months ago. Both these plugins offer similar GT Metrix performance improvements and WP Fastest Cache has been tested on WordPress v4.8.

Installing WP Fastest Cache

I looked for the WP Fastest Cache Plugin on the WP plugin directory but it was not there.

I downloaded the latest version WP Fastest Cache from https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-fastest-cache/

I upload the WP Faster Cache plugin to my site.

I Activated the plugin.

WP Fastest Cache plugin is now installed 🙂

It appears to have auto cached/indexed my site?

Now it’s time to run the same benchmark and see if the site is faster (with the same settings (Singapore chrome))?

1 of 3 test are underway.

WP Fastest Cache Results

Wow WP Fastest Cache loaded my site 2 seconds slower (Try 1 = 23 seconds, Try 2 =  21 seconds and Try 3 =  28 Seconds).

This could have been because of weekend traffic or hosting issues but this was not what I expected.

I disabled the WP Fastest Cache plugin and ran the benchmarks again and it was still 23 seconds (weekend traffic?). I re-enabled WP Fastest Cache and re-ran the test but no improvement.

My bad I think I needed to manually configure the WP Faster Cache plugin by opening the new WP Faster Cache menu on the left-hand side of the WP admin dashboard.

There I enabled caching options in the WP Faster Cache options.

I ran https://www.webpagetest.org tests again and got 16s, 18s and 16s seconds results in three tests and an A on compressed images. It appears you need to manually configure the WP Total Cache plugin after installing it (I missed this step).

I disable WP Fastest Cache and tried the WP Super Cache plugin and the test results were 29s, 24s, 24s (slower than WP Faster Cache). then tried W3 Total cache and the results were ()

I tried the W3 Total Cache plugin and the results were (30s, 16s 26s).

I Tried Autoptimize and it was tested at 45s.

It looks like WP Faster Cache is the fastest, ill turn it back on until try setup a CDN.

Fast Forward to Sept 2017

Since writing this post I have moved away from a shared C-Panel host and have moved my domain to a self-managed Vultr server closer to me, I have moved my email to Google G-Suite. I have learned how to deploy and manage WordPress by command-line tools. I have set up servers on Digital Ocean before but the servers are located in Singapore and not Sydney and latency and scalability was poor. SSL will make sites slower and servers far away will just compound the issues.

Re-enabling the WP Fastest Cache Plugin

I tried reinstalling the WP Fastest Cache plugin and for me, the plugin just slows down my site by 6 seconds.

I opened my NGINX config and got my NGINX user

sudo nano /etc/nginx/nginx.conf

My user is: www-data

I enabled the WP Fastest Cache plugin and ensured the WP Fastest Cache has ownership and access to the cache folder.

sudo chown www-data:www-data /www/wp-content/plugins/cache
sudo chown www-data:www-data /www//wp-content/plugins/cache/all
sudo chmod 755 /www/wp-content/plugins/cache *
sudo chmod 755 /www/wp-content/plugins/cache/all *

Below are the settings I use.

WP Fastest Cache

installing the WP-Optimize Plugin

I recommend setting up WP-Optimize plugin as it will optimize your database and keep things fast, it only saves me a second on my load times but this helps.

WP Optimize

WP-Optimize will allow for to review database optimizations

WP-Optimize database savings

Setting up Nginx GZip Compression

I set up my Nginx config to include

gzip on;
gzip_disable "msie6";

gzip_vary on;
gzip_proxied any;
gzip_comp_level 6;
gzip_buffers 16 8k;
gzip_http_version 1.1;
gzip_types text/plain text/css application/json application/javascript text/xml application/xml application/xml+rss text/javascript;

I set the minimum size to gzip too

gzip_min_length 20;

Benchmark with G-Zip, Caching and WP Fastest Cache 

With WP Fastest Cache I now load my site in 13.9 seconds from Singapore. Time to disable WP Fastest cache plugin as it does not seem to be helping without linking to a CDN.

With Cache plugi

Setting up Browser Caching

I also setup browser caching by editing in NginX.

sudo nano /etc/nginx/sites-available/default

Added

location ~*  \.(jpg|jpeg|png|gif|ico|svg|js|css)$ {
        expires 365d;
}

Not sure if caching CSS and JS will cause problems in future?

Benchmark with G-Zip, Caching and without WP Fastest Cache (Singapore)

I re-ran the tests and got 10.9 seconds and got a B for cached content. When in Started on C-Panel I was getting near 30s

Benchmark

Benchmark with G-Zip, Caching and without WP Fastest Cache (Sydney)

I have always benchmarked from Singapore (as Sydney was not an option when I started) but now it is.  Out f curiosity is my website load time in Sydney?

8.2 seconds. Distance does affect performance.

Google Speed Insights

Google has awesome tools to help you increase your benchmark mobile and desktop website speeds and recommend focus areas to resolve problems: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/

Mobile Speed Score

Desktop Speed Score

Tips

I was getting SVG files failing compassion tests so I added the following under allowed mime types under “http gzip_types” in /etc/nginx/nginx.conf

image/svg+xml text/html+svg

Minifying JS and CSS

This needs to be done and 50% of my site files appears to be CSS and JS related.

It looks like 30%~40 of your sites google speed index is related to minified/combined JS/CSS.

Google Speed Test

I installed the Fast Velocity Minify WordPress plugin.

I ran this to install it from the command line

cd /www/wp-content/plugins#
sudo wget https://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/fast-velocity-minify.2.2.1.zip
--2017-09-23 19:51:46--  https://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/fast-velocity-minify.2.2.1.zip
Resolving downloads.wordpress.org (downloads.wordpress.org)... 66.155.40.187, 66.155.40.203, 66.155.40.188, ...
Connecting to downloads.wordpress.org (downloads.wordpress.org)|66.155.40.187|:443... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 821621 (802K) [application/octet-stream]
Saving to: ‘fast-velocity-minify.2.2.1.zip’

fast-velocity-minify.2.2.1.zip 100%[=================================================>] 802.36K   830KB/s    in 1.0s

2017-09-23 19:51:47 (830 KB/s) - ‘fast-velocity-minify.2.2.1.zip’ saved [821621/821621]

Unzip

sudo unzip merge-minify-refresh.zip

I activated the plugin and set some settings

Minify Settings

Verified minify logs

Logs

Google Page Insights can now see the minifies, css, js and html

Minified

Google Page Insights – Possible Optimizations

issues

And Google Ad Words and Google Analytics appear to be holding back Google Page Insight scores

Google adwords and Analytics

I am getting a few false positives with plugins javascript but that can be resolved another day.

Pingdom (Melbourne results)

3.2 seconds, a few false positives though.

Kingdom

I was going to test with https://www.webpagetest.org/ (from Singapore) but the service kept stalling and had too many tests before me (even from Sydney).

Wait

Address First Byte Time (todo)

If I look at the first-byte load results in the waterfall view my site is taking many seconds to deliver the first byte, this lowers the performance scores about 20%. I need to set up a CDN and or configure NGINX following this guide based on this manual configuration entry (I tried some of the Nginx settings but it appears I need to compile some performance settings into Nginx).

CDN (todo)

I am sure a Content Delivery Network (CDN) will help with the whole page deliver and first-byte times but I am trying to milk as much free as possible and limit future costs. A CDN will trigger higher monthly costs (any CDN providers want to donate a temporary pro plan for review purposes).

Misc Speed Articles

  • Yoast has a good site speed article here: https://yoast.com/site-speed-tools-suggestions/
  • Nginx has a good guide on Nginx performance here: https://www.nginx.com/blog/10-tips-for-10x-application-performance/
  • Google PageSpeed tips: https://developers.google.com/speed/docs/insights/rules

Configuring Ubuntu for Performance

Preventing applications swapping for disk (read more here)

sudo nano /etc/sysctl.conf

I added this memory-related setting.

vm.swappiness = 1

This will all but prevent applications writing to disk (swap) when they are not active. I had free memory on my VM so I may as well use it.

I will monitor the free ram after reboot and play with php memory settings.

ram

Setup Lazyload for images in posts

cd /www/wp-content/plugins/
sudo wget https://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/bj-lazy-load.zip
unzip bj-lazy-load.zip
# activate the plugin

Lazyload Plugin Settings

Lazyload

Placeholder Image ( Image: https://fearby.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/placeholder.jpg )

Web Performance Test from Sydney

8.4 seconds ( Score Card F A A A C, was F F F A F ).  I was getting up to 28 second load times with Net Registry C Panel servers.

Static Content is cached but Googe Ad Sence, Google Analytics, and some plugins do block the score. The front page does have some features content that has to be loaded and can’t be minified or cached much.

Sydney Results

It is obvious I need to work in the initial websitee load (DNS, CDN or SSL), there sis  3 seconds I can save here.

3 sec

Configuring PHP for Performance

todo: PHP base config.

todo: PHP caching.

Conclusion

I was expecting WP Fastest Cache to deliver faster speeds but in reality but I am getting 4 seconds faster in WordPress. I was going to configure MaxCDN but they are to expensive. Fast Velocity Minify Plugin is working a treat 🙂

I ended up ditching the shared CPanel hosted domain and setup my own server for WordPress. My site seems a lot faster now. A friend set up CloudFlare with great success, more soon. I blogged about my server setup here.

Adding browser cache and compressing and moving away from CPanel to a self-managed server helped.

The only things to try now is to use a CDN and speed up the delivery of my site and improve the First Byte Time.

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Revision History

v1.932 added lazy load information (24th Sep 2017)

v1.952 added small changes (23rd Sep 2017)

etc

Filed Under: Blog, Cache, Cloud, Domain, Software, Wordpress Tagged With: cache, cdn, plugin, speed, website, wordpress

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