I’m fully loaded in 1.2 seconds: http://www.webpagetest.org/result/130708_TH_150T/1/details/
I still have work to do such as moving images and css to a cdn.
Will putting my WHOLE website in RAM give me better load performance?
And by this, I mean installing my entire Wordpress, apache, and MySQL to a super fast ramdisk. This entire install is 800 MB. My server has 32 GB RAM.
(of course I will backup the ramdisk every few hours)
No. Not really. Although there are some people who will disagree.
With that amount of memory, there will be shedloads spare. At that time, linux puts it to use as an IO buffer between apps and disk, so only the odd disk write will ever hit the physical disk, and to some extent, at the server’s convenience.
30 years of development has gone into improving MySQL performance by caching most things in memory when they can ( and when they started, disks were really slow! ). Given that this is a website, then 99+% of your traffic will be read. No problem there.
There are loads of caching alternatives for your webserver, PHP opcode, plus the WordPress frontend itself. Investigate these first, then look at what extra you can get out of your server. My experience - the bottleneck on a well tuned server is almost always the raw compute power required to run the PHP scripts ( so add debugging them to the list! ).
I see you’re running apache, so check you’ve got an opcode cacher running - eAccelerator is good, especially as it now seems to be being developed again. As an alternative ( my personal favourite ) look at ditching apache, and using nginx feeding into php-fpm with APC as it’s cacher.
As far as user performance is concerned, I’d look at removing that great big F off the top of your results, by setting expires headers - that ay files can be stored in the clients browser cache for further use! In addition, a TTFB of 0.15s for static content isn’t all that great ( but see below ).
You have very little quantity of content on this page - just 140KB. It may be worth you delivering it with a CDN, but I don’t really expect that it’s that possible to get noticeably better performance.
Your site is allegedly hosted in France. and this seems to be borne out by this: http://www.webpagetest.org/result/130710_8F_BT0/
If your audience is in the US, then hosting it there may well pay dividends.
Your first byte times on all of the responses looks to be about the same as the RTT to the server so throwing more hardware at it won’t fix the problem. Your best bet is to optimize the front-end resource loading.
Using a CDN (there are inexpensive and free options) will reduce the time to load each of the resources.
If you can move as much of your javascript out of the head as possible it will also help (understanding that modernizr still needs to be loaded in the head). This is one area where Chrome is in a bit of flux with it’s prioritization though because it will take blocking script tags from anywhere in the document and prioritize those requests and block images until they complete. If you can use Modernizr’s loader to load the rest of the javascript asynchronously then the images should start downloading sooner for all browsers.