The ISP guys are working on finding out why my WP/Atahualpa site loads so slowly. Oddly, I have WP and Atahualpa in 2 other folders on the same server, and they load quickly. Neither of those has much in their respective databases compared to the one causing trouble.

I looked at the .htaccess files for all three installations. Could this be where the problem is?

For the slow installation, here is the .htaccess file:

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /wp27/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /wp27/index.php [L]
</IfModule>

# END WordPress

For the other two, fast installations, .htaccess is simply:

# BEGIN WordPress

# END WordPress

Could a plugin or widget slow things down?

The other two have no content in their htaccess files because you're not using Permalinks on those two sites I guess.

The htaccess for the one with permalinks looks fine

htaccess does add load but should not cause a noticeable slowdown. Creating the actual WP page should use much more resources than looking up and following the htaccess rules.

OK. I'm frustrated now because I haven't heard back from the ISP folks about this. I wonder what else could be causing the trouble.

Just now, when in the dashboard area, I noticed that when I click on Dashboard itself, I get "Error in connecting to database." But everything else is working there, just slowly.

*EDIT* Well! I never did hear back from the ISP support guys, but I think I fixed it myself. I deactivated and deleted several plugins, including WP-Polls and Poll Daddy, and Next Gen gallery. I'm not sure which one was the problem, but now I'm getting normally fast loading time. Would somebody please test it yourself and let me know how it seems to you?

http://larchmontgazette.com/wp27/ This is the front page, with one 87kb image and several 8k images.

I am still getting the database error message when clicking on Dashboard from within Dashboard.

From the UK I am getting page load times on your site of between 3 and 6 seconds (YSlow). This seems to be an acceptable speed.

Your database connection problems remind me of a similar issue I once had when running a couple of Joomla sites in different sub directories. One was fine, the other was very slow and kept coming up with database connection issues. When I accessed the SQL database of the slow one directly through PHP Admin it would take around a minute to load. It transpired that the server that held this database was suffering from heavy loads from other databases housed on it that were nothing to do with me but were reducing its overall efficiency.

In your case it might be as simple as conducting some housekeeping on the database that serves your site.

I'll ask the ISP guys about that.

We have 8 databases enabled and are using only 4 of them. They are all, as far as I know, on the same server.

By the way, what did think of Joomla?

Originally Posted by paulae

...<snip>...

http://larchmontgazette.com/wp27/ This is the front page, with one 87kb image and several 8k images.

...<snip>...

g'Morning Paula! The front page just now loaded quickly enough that it didn't even occur to me to time it.

Question: Might occasional load delay be related to the "serving" of the various ads you have positioned on your pages. I can see there's some kind of a script running that's loading a selection of ad graphics -- where are they coming from?

I was a bit surprised to hear that the "waterfall" was 86+ KB. I re-processed it through PhotoShop, saved it at a "jpg quality rating" of 50% using PS's "Save for Web and Devices" option and came up with a very acceptable (saying so myself! ) downsized 24 KB version of the pic. I didn't even feel that the result needed any re-sharpening. "Mine" is the first pic, the original on your Front Page is the lower.





I was a photographer in a previous life so count "fooling around with PhotoShop" as one of my many hobbies.

BTW -- The Larchmont Gazette Atahualpa site is looking AWESOME ....TOTALLY!!

Your version certainly looks fine. I did use PS's Save for Web option but did it at 100%. I guess I could be thriftier with file sizes, right? Thanks for the heads-up on that one! And thanks for the kudos about the way the site is looking. I struggle with making graphics for the site, since I'm not a graphic designer by experience or training. I took the header photo a couple of days ago down by Long Island Sound, and applied the blue color, tried to feather it for softening, and slapped on the text. I'm not fully happy with it, but it's something to put there for now. Of course, by the time we go live with the redesign, we'll need a more spring-like photo! Changing with the seasons isn't a bad idea anyway.

We use a Perl script called csBanner to serve our ads. I have dummy ads in there at the moment while we settle on where and what will go up.

I'm a budding photographer, one of those obnoxious types who buys fancy equipment before being worthy of it! I have a Nikon D300 and I'm mystified by most of what it can do. In April, I'm going to a workshop in D.C. put on by the National Geographic, so I should learn a lot there. In the meantime, I'm busily shooting flora, fauna and hapless passersby in my town.

I love your use of photography on your site, by the way. Do you have an online gallery of your stuff?

You have 6x queries - is that not a lot?

There have been posts about tricks to speed up WP like in this one http://forum.bytesforall.com/showthr...ghlight=speedy but Ive not seen Widget cache mentioned http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-widget-cache/ if serving files works well enough limiting database load might be all you need. Ive tried it and was impressed Compare before/after and see for yourself. Check plugin site for comments, issues - worked out of the box for me but of course be careful if you go crazy and combine with other caching. Screenshots on WP site should explain how little it take to set up. "No cache" could be for special widgets which has own caching or just dont work well with this, ajax? From what I know it is safe to try out so keep eye on footer...

I know it does not work with Widget logic, a plugin which lets you decide which widgets to show on each page.

Tried Gzip? You dont use it right now. Sounds good but also show why each have to test on their site/host. If I enable gzip on host site slows down big time, they are cheap with cpu power I think. Bandwidth is of course divided by 4 or 5, Gzip works great but overall result is still not useful. Test and test

I'm not even sure what the number of queries means. I thought maybe it means the number of individual items on the page being "hit"?

Of course, there are more than that on the front page if you count the images alone!

I guess I'm happy enough with the speed at the moment, but I may try the widget cache plugin. I do have a lot of widgets running!

Yes you have. I would not be surprised if you get 4x or less queries with Widget Cache. Well, opposite some other speed up thingys this is painless to test. The few problems can be fixed with no-cache, changing widget can usually be handled with auto-expire setting.

If host is slow with database output it will help speed things up. Less is better. I would think 6x is quite a lot, bordering on too much? If it works then why bother unless you like "optimization" but remember plugin if database load becomes a problem and you dont feel up to Super Cache.

You can test site with Firebug or these sites though less queries in footer is enough proof, as said less is always better. http://performance.webpagetest.org:8080/test http://tools.pingdom.com/ and to prepare for popularity http://loadimpact.com/ They are not exact science but you do get some numbers

Let someone else define database queries, for me it is number of questions to your hosts sql-database server - so WP can present site properly. 6x questions takes longer to answer than 4x. Host will probably have some sql-caching as well but this could help and is deadeasy to use/setup.

Thank you! I ran a test, and it looks to me like a big problem is Share This. First of all, I don't want it showing up after every post excerpt on the front page. It looks like Share This is being called over and over on the page. I need to figure out how to get the icon to stop showing up there, first of all.

http://performance.webpagetest.org:8...9PB/1/details/

*EDIT* OK, I deactivated Share This and reactived Tell A Friend, which for some reason does not append itself to every front page excerpt. The load time is vastly reduced now, down to a little over 1 second. Great! Thanks for taking time to look at this.

You sound like a database guy. Do you know an automated way to import HTML files into Wordpress? We have a lot of legacy content we'd love to include without just linking backward to it.

No but imagine it will be difficult. Was searching WP and stumbled across a paulaeisenberg so you know it already. Found another thread stating same hmmm concerns http://wordpress.org/support/topic/209153 Codex have this http://codex.wordpress.org/Importing...om_.5BX.5DHTML not of much help. Will require someone to know those files, before and after stripping - then know how output is accepted by database. Testing. You need someone who get high on reading posts like this http://web-tech.ga-usa.com/2008/11/m...a-web-cmsblog/ Im happy to say it is not me

Paulae

Further back in your thread you asked me what I thought of Joomla.

Basically it's horses for courses. Joomla is a CMS which can be a blog, whilst Wordpress is a blog which can be a CMS. I've used Joomla where most of the content will be written by me. The user content makes up the integrated forum which keeps the site fresh when I am busy with other things. See Oystertown. It can deal with article comments like Wordpress but moves them to new forum threads which keeps things more structured.

At present I am using Wordpress to build an event site which I will hand over to someone else to maintain and for that reason I felt that the backend was a little less daunting for the uninitiated.

Thanks for the info on Joomla. I had downloaded it months ago, poked around a bit, and got it to work a bit, but I decided it was too complicated to try to teach it to others. Not that Wordpress is a walk in the park, really, but I think if I get it set up just right, I can safely hand off day to day stuff to others. I've been trying to "retire" from the Gazette for years now! A friend and I founded it in 2002, and she is still heavily involved in reporting and editing, while I've been doing the techie side of things. WP seems to be the least cumbersome of the choices out there.

I love the idea that it's open-source, continually improved by a community of talented, passionate people.

Like our dear Flynn, of course!