Find your WordPress blog is loading slow?   Do you ever get a “MySQL
server has gone away” message?  Maybe your WordPress Admin Panel is
running slow?   Even if none of those apply to you, the higher the
traffic your WordPress blog receives, the more important it is to have
an optimal setup.

In case you’d like to maximize your blog’s performance, Vladimir Porlovac has published a pretty good WordPress Optimization Guide which contains a number of great tutorials and tips for WordPress users.

Here are the 10 topics which are covered in the post:

1. Check the Connection
2. Check your (Vista) System
3. Check the Plugins
4. Check your Theme
5. Optimize Database Tables
6. Turn off Post Revisions
7. Implement Caching (WordPress Cache, MySQL Optimization, PHP Opcode Cache)
8. “MySQL server has gone away” workaround
9. Fixing posting not possible problem
10. Other reasons for slow posting

A few of these steps can be