I'm just reporting what I see, and it makes sence that it would take longer because extra requests would have to be made, although, maybe it is faster after the first load. If the css remains in the cache, then it won't have to be loaded a second time, so you save that time, but the first load will be slower.

everything is a trade off. Stop using photos and rotating headers and fancy effects and ad's and google tracking and java scripts and your site will load FAST...might look like h*** but it would load fast. Everything is a trade off.

You got that right, about trade-offs.

Another question: if I have CSS set to external, and I make a change via the CSS inserts, will the change automatically show up in the now-external CSS file?

it should, why are you seeing an issue?

Then I'm just confused. I changed the background gif. Copy and pasted what you had Juggledad. Paulae, I added the favicon, thanks for catching that.

I made my JS and CSS internal and tested it. It made the load time double. So, I'm going to keep it external.

Looks like we've gotten it down to 4.5ish seconds! Which is great, but it sure does seem like it takes longer than that in "real time".

If the apture is a hang up, then I guess that I can live with it being 4 seconds, but I sure would like it to be closer to 2 like Juggledad's. Any ideas?

JD, no, I'm not having a problem with that. Just wondering.

JD, about Shari's site: Is this weird?

<p><script type="text/javascript">SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: "Communication Skills for Leaders: What You Can Learn from Coca-Cola CEO", url: "http://presentingmatters.com/blog/communication-skills-for-leaders/" });</script>

A plugin is generating that sharethis code.

sharialexander, I'm getting 19 seconds to get it to load. Who is your host? Looking at it with Firebug, it seems most of the delay is waiting for the host to respond, so your probably on a shared server that is highly loaded.

Putting the CSS inline shouldn't cause that kind of problem.

I also notice that several of your images you are grabbing from an external site - that is extra time, why not make a copy and serve it locally

If you want it to run faster, get a faster Host - a dedicated server, trim the plugins.

I contacted my host earlier this morning. They are moving it to a faster server. They said to give it about 8 hours to go through. I too thought that might have been the issue. Hopefully, this time tomorrow the load time will be faster.

Don't have too many plugins, will see if I can trim.

Will definitely take your advice about the images!

I'll look at it tomorrow and see if there's any big changes.

Thanks again!

Wow, down to 4 seconds to load - just by switching it to a server that isn't as highly loaded.

This makes the point. It's not the software, it's the load on the hardware that causes most slowdowns. That is where the biggest gain will come from.

If you are paying $1.99/month (or $6.99) for hosting, you are going to see slow performance. No one is going to give you a dedicated server for that amount (they have to make money). Where I host my personal site I pay $10.00month - a dedicated server starts at $210/month - which do you think would give better response?

And you are still at the mercy of all those machines between you and the server and the load on them and there is nothing you can do about that issue...unfortuately

Which host do you use?

I use Westhost.net and have been very happy with them (if you go to them, name me as a referer and I think I get a free month)

Westnet:
Premium Hosting, $12.95/month

* 50GB Web Space
* 1000GB Bandwidth

Prohosting:
We're paying $34.95/month for Plan B: 2000MB storage and 50GB transfer, and we're up to 1911.60MB of disk usage and 3835.62MB of bandwidth usage. I'm attaching a screencap of our usage from our control panel.

I always have trouble figuring out these numbers. If you were us, would you switch hosts, knowing of the hassle it would be?

Well at Westhost, the business plan is $16.95/mo for 100GB storage and 2000GB bandwidth
you pay $34.95/mo for 2GB storage and 50GB bandwidth
so you are paying twice as much for 1/50th the storage and 1/40th the bandwidth or to put it another way, for half the monthly cost, you could get 50 times the storage and 40 times the bandwidth
or for $20 more per month, you could be on a semi dedicated server

but your right, there is the hasssle of switching

Hi I just found this post and I am having a problem with my site loading slow

http://www.paginadeinicio.com.mx/blog/

I am on a dedicated host 4 procesosrs and 16gigs of ram plenty of bandwidth and 500 gigs of storage so the server is very capable

I am runing WP Super Cache and DB Cache

but the site still loads extremly slow most the time and sometimes causes my whole servers MYsql to go down it has a huge server load

is it the theme that is causing the problem or what is wrong what can I do please any help would be appreciated

by the way not sure if this helps my host sent me this saying this might be part of the problem

3 admin2_pa localhost admin2_pag 3 Query SELECT * FROM wp_posts, wp_postmeta WHERE wp_posts.ID = wp_postmeta.post_id AND wp_postmeta.meta_key = '_pingme' LIMIT 1
11 admin2_pa localhost admin2_pag 3 Query SELECT * FROM wp_posts, wp_postmeta WHERE wp_posts.ID = wp_postmeta.post_id AND wp_postmeta.meta_key = '_pingme' LIMIT 1
15 admin2_pa localhost admin2_pag 3 Query SELECT * FROM wp_posts, wp_postmeta WHERE wp_posts.ID = wp_postmeta.post_id AND wp_postmeta.meta_key = '_pingme' LIMIT 1



But I don't understand this at all

Juggledad is great at troubleshooting these things.

One thing I notice is you're using DB Cache. I did too, for a while, until my hosting support guy told me it was causing errors. I got rid of it and things were a bit better.

Get rid of the cache files it creates, too.

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.