my MYSQL database for this site is like 800 megsand it was my host that added it supposobly to fix this problem of slowing down and messing up the server

do you have a 'pingme' plugin? try disabling it

Not sure if I have that but as soon as my host gets MYSQL up again since it has once again gone down I will login and check just a question where would I disable it I know I don't have it in a plugin

maybe some 'social' plugin? I'm just going from the SELECT's you posted. A quick google search of '_pingme' pulls up gopingme.com.

If you want me to look into this in depth, send me a PM and I'll give you my rates

I noticed a considerable slowdown with the ATO CSS external on and a slight speed up with javascript external on. Also I use this plugin (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/web-optimizer/) that compresses the css and having ATO CSS compression also on slowed things way down.

For those wanting a speed up, I recommend this plugin, http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/web-optimizer/

One of my websites has 96 plugins running and it still loads usually in 5 or 6 seconds. Also use wp widget cache, supercache, parallel load, Use Google Libraries, Image Optimizer and ImageShack Offloader plugins to speed things up. And I have Xcache loaded on the server side.

I've been blogging on Hostgator for years and years (less than $10) and never had a problem. They are A++. In fact, I just moved on to one of their beta VPS servers and it screams. That being said, I'm running version 3.4.3 (3.4.1 on some of my blogs) and have commission junction and adsense ads loading on my front page, load 19 plugins including the ridiculously high resource abusing translator plugin, plus load an external webpage (box scores) and my load times rarely exceed 0.45 seconds, and that's high for just 42 queries. On the VPS I loaded Wordpress MU with the same theme, copied everything over, and I'm getting 0.23 loads despite over 100 queries. Unbelievable stuff.

Now I'll pass along a few things I found out along the way. One, the Sociable plugin has become a resource pig so I went back to using version 3.50; two, I use inline javascript and css; three, I optimize my database often since I get decent traffic and I have more than 4,000 posts covering almost 5 years; I have tried all the cache programs but WP Super-cache easily outperforms the rest for me using super-cache as well as compression (I go into super-cache lock down mode at times); and lastly, all this talk about needing to combine css, get optimizer this or that, or try other third party things was a bunch of pookie for me. There's only three reasons this theme loads slow for me: 1) some plugins are hogs.. turn them all off and load them one by one and watch your site load times to see if that's a problem; 2) your design work stinks (ie: loading huge images, non-existent things, or maybe doing too much); or 3) your host is crap (ie: bluehost, godaddy, and some others were bad experiences for me).

This theme is a resource hog of sorts if you consider milliseconds too much, but if you are getting load times over 1 second you need to look at the three things above. Something's wrong. And, by the way, if you have 96 plugins loading on your site, you need a programmer, not another cache. But that's my two cents.

Keep up the good work Flynn. (and no, I'm not a paid supporter)

Hi

I'm a newbie at this and I've just put up my first site with the help of a friend. Everything looks great but it loads really slow on both our computers and we can't figure out why. My site is www.senserene.com.

Thanks for your help.

Serene

are you on a shared server? the reason I ask is the first time I asked for a page it took 20 seconds, but after that is was 1-2 seconds. That would lead me to think that it was on a shared server.

you can use the 'Yslow' plugin for FireFox and take a look at things

Hi

Thanks for your email. Sorry it took me so long to reply. I had to ask around a bit and the short answer is yes, I'm on a shared server. Is this an undesirable thing? Should I move to an unshared server?

Regards
Serene

Well if you have it on an unshared server, all the resources of the server will be dedicated to you site - this comes with a cost, dedicated servers are more expensive...way more expensive. Some hosts cram as many people on a server as they can, others will gaurentee a limited number of sites on a server. Check out some of the other hosts if you are not satisfied with yours.

Hi

Actually I just registered with this hosting company on the recommendation of my friend. I've never registered before so I have no idea about these matters. If I do not change hosting companies, is it not possible to get the website to load faster?

Thanks.

Serene

senserene, if you have read thru this thread you will see that it's all about trade off's. If you want incredibly fast response, you can get it, however the trade will be lots of $$$'s. if you want to spend as little as possible on your web site, then you are probably going to see 'not the best' speed loading the pages.

there are so many variables that affect speed (what is your connection speed to the internet, if you are dialup, it swill be slow no matter what - how fast is your computer, what is running on your computer, how many hops thru the internet is is from your computer to the host, how much data is your web page grabbing from some other computer on the internet,...the list goes on and on.

this isn't the place to solve the problem. If you don't understand what has been mentioned and don't know how to do some of the things, then I recommend that you hire someone who does know what they are doing. good luck.

Senserene, I notice that your homepage has nothing in the title area of the header. I don't know if that matters at all, but I wonder if it might slow things down?

Hi

Thanks. I'll go look into it.

Regards
Serene

Revisiting this thread -

My client has dozens of websites on GoDaddy shared hosting; with lots of wordpress scattered into that mix (as primary sites or integrated into HTML sites) I'm pretty certain there's some kind of problem between GoDaddy's servers (at least the shared ones) and Atahualpa.

When ATA is the theme, load times can be very long - up to 9 seconds with only a few plugins. The biggest thing I see is when making changes in ATA theme options; I can make two or three changes, but then I'll, say, paste in a CSS insert or add a line somewhere, hit the big green button and... page tries to refresh forever until I get a "can't find the server" message. If I try to open the blog in another browser, same thing - totally hung up, "no server", and it takes about 5 minutes to come back to life. (I'm assuming it has possibly something to do with GD's implementation of MySQL? Or it's just traffic overload on a shared server?) Doesn't happen when using the wordpress page or posts interface, or with simpler themes I use - ATA's the only theme I use that seems to use some sort of database of its own though.

Thus, developing a site design with ATA on GD is (to be mild) very frustrating. However, I can do design things with ATA that would take major, major hacking in any other theme I know of.

My client's pretty big (an NYSE co. in fact) and it seems pretty silly for them to be using all this "consumer" -ish shared hosting on GoDaddy; I'm going to talk to sales today and see if we can get our own server or some sort of solution - I'll let you know how it goes.

I feel your pain. It does sound silly for your client to be on godaddy. At the very least, they should be on a dediicated server. Try hostgator. My atahualpa sites run fine there on shared servers.

I wonder if you have a corrupted database that could cause your odd problems.

Nope, this seems to be a standard issue with ATA and GoDaddy - getting it on many sites.

Just talked to their sales/support, I think we'll buy a dedicated and try it out.

The way it would work is, we get the server with an ip address for transferring files & development, and then just re-point URLs as needed - right now I'm developing a wordpress version of an existing site... and transferring that test site to the root when completed was worrying me, as we'd have some downtime. (Luckily in this case all my external images are in a static root level directory that won't change when WP is moved, and all of them use absolute paths, so most of my linked graphics should be fine).

Now my worry would be developing a site on an IP address setup, have to see what to use for the wordpress blog address in that case... and we use Cforms to track where form submitters came from (if they came from PPC we can track that, etc) but Cforms relies on a site root path, etc...

My head already hurts too much by 5PM! But I've managed to visually duplicate an existing site that's 100% flash with ATA/Wordpress so we've now got far more update and page-depth flexibility. Can't imagine doing that with a standard theme. Pretty dang cool.

Try this http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/ in google webmaster tools. It worked for me.

You guys are good. It seems everyone that came with sloooow speeds are quite zippy now.
Let me show you slow. www.stangsgarage.com

I'm been doing away with plugins, but I'd like to hear what the speed looks like on your end as I know PC's and whatnot can all be different. This theme totally rocks and I know I can get my site quicker.

The site is over 10 years old now and getting more traffic than ever before. I don't want to scare people away with slow load times now that they are coming. Any help after a visit to The Garage would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Stang
KF7HWA

Anyone using PHP Speedy still? The developer doesn't look very active anymore
http://aciddrop.com/2009/02/

Well it makes your page load slightly faster, but your CPU/RAM usage will skyrocket. Use W3 Total Cache (quick but not incompatible with many plugins) or "WP Supercache Plus" (not WP Supercache which is slower), if you wan't to speed up the site. And switch to php-fpm and nginx for hosting.

I already implemented and tested the new way options are saved and retrieved in 3.4.7 and it works well so far, only 1 query instead of up to 250+ per pageview. 3.4.7 will be released within very few days.

I wanted to finish the import/export functionality, the second big improvement, as well for 3.4.7 but will probably leave that for 3.4.8

Hi

Just doing a bit of reading up on gzip.

Would this code do anything in my header file above the first line.


<?php if (substr_count($_SERVER['HTTP_ACCEPT_ENCODING'], 'gzip')) ob_start("ob_gzhandler"); else ob_start(); ?>

Would it compress anything

Many thanks

Flynn told that he will in future (next major version?) change the style to be external static by default.. then it will for sure be available as gzip version and should be again a major performance upgrade. I just hope it will not break qtranslate....

As for gzip, just install wp-supercache-plus or another good caching system, then all second and further page requests get the full page gzipped anyhow. Even if deflate is very fast, you would not want to compress on the fly all the time (all plugins that do things this way, will in reality really slow down your server, worst plugins like phpspeedy that are your best bet if you want to crash your server).

My site is also running really slow, http://www.minenightclub.com. I am running the following:

WordPress 2.9.2.
Atahualpa 3.4.4
PHP 5
MySql 5.0

CSS / Java are set as external

I have only a few plugins installed.

I have tried the following plugins (not at the same time) in the attempt to speed the site up, but I did not see a difference:
Quick Cache
WP Super Cache
W3 Total Cache (this is the one that is active right now)

In this forum post, someone mentioned using WP Super Cache 2 - but it looks like this plugin is no longer available.

I have also reorganized and analyzed my database tables - still no discernible effect.

One of the things I have read about doing is to update the header.php using static title, favicon and stylesheet - however in the BFA header.php the area of the code to change is not that straight forward to be able to change this.

Who is the host and if you are on a shared server, how many other sites are being shared there? You will probable have to ask the host about that.

If I make the switch from Inline to External, will ATA automatically re-configure the files, or is there something I need to do?

Doc

Globalnerds... Your backbround image is 769KB which could be contributing to a slow load time.

lmilesw - thanks for the catch on the size of the background. I have changed it so that the background image is now 98kb and the header is now 33kb - I don't see a big difference.

This site is being hosted on Godaddy shared hosting, but I have other sites on the same platform and don't see the types of load times as this site. I can't figure out what the issue could be.

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated!


Thanks!!!!

The background image is still large for a background. I see it as 70k, but the dimensions are huge: 1600px × 1172px (scaled to 886px × 649px). Can you try the load-time with no background image at all?

Even on the dress code page, it's almost 3 seconds to load, 154 queries. I'm not sure why there are so many queries. My front page has a zillion queries because it's accessing so much information, and I cut down on the number of queries a lot by using the DB Cache Reloaded plugin.

The registrar is listed as moniker.com and I can't get to their site. Could they be having some DNS latency issues? Maybe you should transfer your domains to GoDaddy since that is where they are hosted. I have also read mixed reviews of GoDaddy as a host.

Thanks paulae for the info. I have removed the background image completely, I disabled W3 Total Cache and installed and activated DB Cache Reloaded. However, I don't really see a big difference.

Any suggestions??

The background image is still there.

I had taken it down for my testing and put it back up.... I just took it off again.

Thanks for all of your help!!

Try disabling your plugins, all of them, test after that. Then add them back one at a time, testing each time. Something is making your site very slow to even start rendering. Can you check to see what your .htaccess file looks like? Paste it in here so we can take a look.

What hosting company is it?

.htaccess is as follows:

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>

# END

The hosting is godaddy. I have seen other postings about them being slow, but I have other sites on godaddy without this issue. I will disable all plugins and enable one at a time as you suggested... Thanks!

Just as a test can you temporarily disable the Daves Live Search plugin? This is only a hunch. To test all of the plugins you could of course disable all and start adding them back in one a time to see when the load time goes up. Your queries only show 2 with a time of 3+ seconds. I have a site that shows 110 queries with a time of less than one half second.

You must have disabled the plugins. Now I'm getting 137 queries. 0.830 seconds.

Something made a big difference.

It's slowing down again: 8 queries. 1.674 seconds just now. I see he has Pixopoint plugin running. He should try disabling that. I wonder if it needs to be integrated in the theme, and since he's trying the new theme, maybe he hasn't put the code in the right place? So this might be causing a hang-up?