Offloading comments/login to thirdparty from Expressionengine to speed up website

1) Of course. Since they are not handled by your server anymore. In this case server side code like PHP and more important your MYSQL database will be off loaded to an external party. Disqus is widely used and will probably also increase commenting as users will not need to register in your site for commenting. If you need more interaction in the future, you can even port or bridge the user to EE users. If all you ever need is just comment, stick with it.

2) None. You can pretty much load balance every single PHP file and web front among multiple servers. Using heavy caches like Varnish will of course help and EE supports Memcache and others, your bottle neck will be the database, MYSQL, clustering that is another pig and more complicated but I don’t think in your case it would have such an impact as you said its mainly for reading so you can cache basically everything into serving static HTML copies. Apache and Web servers are so efficient with static content that you can serve millions of visits from even a modest servers as long as you are sending a plain HTML page. The minute you add PHP or dynamic processing of any kind performance drops heavily.

3) I guess, depending on your users and where they are in the world. Check if the CDN are close to your targets. And if the CDN is a bad one it can actually hurt in speed. Proper configured fast servers can be more efficient than bad loaded CDN servers which are sharing your use among thousand of other users. I know CDN’s are popular but I’m not a fan. Not in performance and not in security. User Internet connections are so fast today that the benefit is negligent, unless you are using it for big downloads, video, streaming. For webpages alone your speed gaining are mostly nothing.

4) Piwik. Remote code will always be slower. You can optimize your servers and every single line code in your pages to be crazy fast but the minute you have external dependencies like Google Analytics they will be slowed down. Parallel request and putting them in the bottom should help but I found out that nothing beats your own hosted files in terms of speed/performance. So I would say if you can do it, Piwik will beat it anytime as you can’t host Analytic’s locally anymore (you could when it was Urchin which Google purchased). You also get far more control on something which can read logs directly like Piwik. You can measure every single hit as opposed something like Analytic which can’t read your server logs and so will miss a huge amount of data. Faster and you have more control.

5) Yes

Note: Soft Raid? A big no. Always use hardware raid cards with proper raid hardrives, otherwise they can be kicked from the array. The biggest performance bottle neck on any server is disk access. Now even with SSD drives, there is a limit, you can always add more CPU, more RAM (depending on your server) but drive access is usually limited, its always the slowest part of any system, so the faster you can get it, the better. Use RAID 10 with multiple SSD drives and cache everything to RAM before it hits drives. Your server chip is also not the greatest. E3 while Xeon is targeted for workstations or small servers.

Questions

1) Yes

2) Using Varnish appropriately will mean your hardware requirements will be drastically smaller than without. The running Varnish on your server consumes minimal resources to serve the same page - or even better run Varnish close to your users in a cloud solution (no deployment, metrics/logs already setup, free) - www.section.io

3) Cloudflare is great for static content however Varnish comes into its own with its ability to have fine grained controls

4) Make sure to implement GA in a way to runs after the visible page content is loaded and no problems

5) Yep