You are all SO good at this....maybe you could take a quick look at my site and let me know what you are seeing:

www.theadventurebite.com

My internet is pretty slow but my site seems a little slower than most. Really like what I have going with it but am open to adding/removing things to speed it up. I have quite a few plugins so I am working on trimming that down but didn't know if you could see any that were really hanging things up.

Thanks!

Dani

Dani,
Firebug reports the page load at 3.066 seconds but there is an error

i just found this thread... i was wondering whether anyone can take a look at my site? www.imaginacionatrapada.com.ar

it goes kind of slow, specially the imaginacion atrapada TV section www.imaginacionatrapada.com.ar/tv/

there's a great chance it¡s the hosting's server, but maybe i can do something to speed things up a little bit, because http://www.imaginacionatrapada.com.a...enes-alteradas loads a lot better - it's quite plain, but anyway...

thanx in advance
D

Hi Juggledad,

Thanks for the reply. Can you take a quick peek at my site again: www.theadventurebite.com.

I am gettting quite a few errors and I am not sure where to even start looking to fix them. I am really hesitant to go digging in my backend files without knowing what I am doing :)

Thanks so much!

what kind of errors? I don't see any when I go to the site.

About Gzip - I went to my host (godaddy.com) and their help page says to make gzip work by adding the following code to the very top of my web pages above the DOCTYPE:
<?php if (substr_count($_SERVER['HTTP_ACCEPT_ENCODING'], 'gzip')) ob_start("ob_gzhandler"); else ob_start(); ?>

Two questions:
1. Does this make sense with Atahualpa?
2. How do it do this?
Thanks, Ed

You will have to edit header.php and put it in - watch the php/HTML escaping

As to if it is a good idea, try it and see if it improves things.

juggledad - you said "watch the php/HTML escaping" - :confused: Forgive me, please, but I don't know what that means. Ed

I mean you have to be careful when adding php or Html/ In this case you should be fine, I jut looked at header.php and you can drop that in 'as is' as the first line with no worries

Thanks - by the way, I have two separate WordPress sites, both running Atahualpa, both hosted on GoDaddy - one is running slower than molasses, the other is quite quick. Looks like Atahualpa isn't a meaningful factor in the slowdown.

That could be an indication that the two sites are on two different servers and one has a lighter load than the other

I also thought that having the CSS external was faster since it would be cached. I don't know what to think about this.

Thanks. I found the web analysis extremely useful. I had a plug in that I wasn't using that was sucking 20 seconds of time.

another thing to check is the number of other sites sharing your server. You can use domaintools.com to look at this info.

I solved all of my Atahualpa speed problems by moving from GoDaddy and one&1 to HostGator. Gator's very fast.

Your top banner is 146K in size and takes 2 seconds to load according to my Firebug. You should consider reducing its size, e.g. with this image optimizer. You may also consider reducing the size of the images used in your posts.

I have to concur that ATA does slow a WP site considerably. I've tested other themes with same plugins load much faster :-(

BTW, the test here http://www.webpagetest.org/ mentions
DOM Elements = 189
Is this affecting load times and something that can be reduced?

Also, the css and js are dynamically generated like this when selecting the option for them to be external: /?bfa_ata_file=css
Could this be adding to load?

We all know speed is ever more important, so any optimisation of the theme itself would really be appreciated.
Many thanks,

- Vincent

I don't know if this is the proper place to post this question, but my question is along lines of performance, albeit very general.

What is a "baseline" number of queries w/Atahualpa and NO plugins? I utilize a number of them, and right now my site hits about 40 queries a page. Good? Bad?

I realize I could deactivate plug-ins myself and check myself, but I have had problems in the past with losing settings upon deactivation.

Thanks,

Tim

why not create a 'playground' site you can mess with? you can create a new database, install wordpress in a subfolder pointing at the new database and then experiment. If you have a domain already, you can put it in a subfolder of the root (call it 'wp-test') of the domain and then get to it with 'htt;://yourdomain.com/wp-test.

at ato->Style & edit FOOTER->Show number of queries & timer? you can turn it on to see.

FYI Atahualpa only has 1 row in the database.

Thanks for the idea.

And I do have the timer/queries enabled, but I did not activate it 'til recently, and realized I didn't really have a "baseline" to check against.

Am I wrong to assume that SQL queries are going to be the "heaviest" (in terms of load speed) factors?

Also, what about CSS rules that aren't applied every page, e.g., I'm using contact form 7. I have disabled JS and CSS for it, but I still had to create a bunch of CSS selectors to style it effectively. I added these changes in CSS inserts sections, but I don't know if it's "wasting" time to apply these rules to every page when they are only needed on one page. Would it be better to apply inline selectors in the body of that particular page?

Please help me understand the big difference between the different page load times reported as follows:

Atahualpa Footer --- 2.8 seconds
YSlow --- 13 seconds

Which one is the actual page load time as seen by search engines?
And which of the above is indicative of the actual page load time for first-time visitors?

The site in question is: DIY Computer Repair Resources

if you are talking about the '234 queries. 3.460 seconds.' that is how long Atahualpa measures the queries you are making to the database. The page load is dependent on many other things, like
- how many other sites are you grabbing info from
- what are those site's response times
- what is the load on the server the site is running on
- are the pages cached

these are just a few of the things that can effect the page load time

Essentially Atahualpa still ain't the fastest, but the Server is the main culprit. My sites take 0.3 to 0.4 seconds to render on a dedicated server (that idles mostly) with 8GB/i7 Quadcore. On my old Celeron 2.8Ghz it took 1.7-3seconds to render a page.

Thanks for your reply, so the one reported by YSlow is the actual page load time?

In the real world, YSlow seems rather useless as a measure of actual page loading speed. cnn.com, which loads very fast for me, gets a YSlow grade of D. One of my Ata sites, which for me seems to load a bit slower than cnn.com, gets a grade of C. Most of the problem on my site, according to YSlow, is that their are 21 components, mainly plugins, with no "expire headers." I get an F for that.

if you have two computers side by side and tell them both to load the page at the same time, but one is a PC with 256MB memory running XP on a 1.6mHz and 10 other programs running the other is a 3.0mHz machine with 8GB of memory running Win7 with only 1 program running, which is one will show the real page load time?

I've been looking at my page load times using Pingdom Tools and noticed this JS Loading:

wp-includes/l10n.js?ver=2010110

Searches came up with a way to remove it which is:

To remove it add the following to your theme's functions.php file:
wp_deregister_script('l10n');

So, the question is what the heck is it and is it needed?

did you try a google search?

Yes, that's how I found the solution to remove it. Seems to be some disagreement on exactly what it's for as it apparently started appearing in WP 3.1.

This is the WP Support Thread I found...maybe you'll understand it?

Two more threads I found that might help with speed:

This one discusses the wp-includes/l10n.js?ver=2010110 as well as comment-reply.js:

And this one has a simple fix for the comment-reply.js:

Would it be possible to incorporate the comment-reply.js: fix into future releases of Theme?

So we all need to add to the theme functions file?
What are the implications?