The subject line above is what somebody said about our newspaper: http://www.larchmontgazette.com/

Ever since switching from Atahualpa 3.2 to 3.4.3, we've been really slow. We've also had some puzzling database server "loops," where nobody can get into the site. The hosting company says it must be a plugin we're using. The ones we're using now are the same ones we had in place before the theme upgrade, except that, on their recommendation, I removed wp-cache, since they thought it might be causing problems.

Our site is very slow to load, and I'm sure we're losing some readers. I'm going to attach the full list of plugins. 31 active. Anybody see anything obvious that shouldn't be there?

http://www.larchmontgazette.com/plugins.jpg (You'll have to magnify to read this screen cap.)

EDIT: I should correct myself. After we were hacked in early September, the consultant added a few security plugins, like Bad Behavior, Limit Login Attempts, and a few others I've since disabled.

Thought I'd show our .htaccess file, to see if it looks OK:

SetEnv PHP_DEFAULT_VERSION 5

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
 RewriteEngine On

# Rewrite larchmontgazette.com to www.larchmontgazette.com
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^larchmontgazette.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.larchmontgazette.com/$1 [L,R=301]

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

# END WordPress

</IfModule>

Is that last "/IfModule" correct?

Wow, 22 seconds for me to get anything other than a white screen. I am on dialup and that is even long for me. It took close to a full minute for the page to finish loading.

7 secs to load an article, which isn't bad for me.

I will bet that part of the slowness is caused from the featured content gallery. Adsense also slows things down abit.

</IfModule> is the close of the module. <IfModule> starts above

That gallery really slows things

Not good!

OK, I've disabled the Featured Content Gallery and removed the code for it from index.php. Will you try again?

I also switched CSS and Javascript to inline, just to see if it makes a difference. You'd think external would be better, but maybe not in this case.

Much better than before

You know you can test loading speed at a few places - here's one
http://www.webpagetest.org/test

another
http://tools.pingdom.com/

Thanks. Yes, I've tried those in the past and did so again just now. Maybe Juggledad or Flynn could at some point paste in my URL there and see the long batch of results, and tell me if there is more I could be doing at the theme level to get the speed up.

When I clear my browser cache in Firefox and Safari, I'm getting just over 2 seconds with FF and just under with Safari.

It's odd, though. If you go to cnn.com, the page is very fast to load. If you test it with those test sites, it doesn't do well in the results. I don't know what to think.

I'm using pingdom to test. I'm getting my best speed with CSS external and compressed, and JS inline.

It loads very quick here. I haven't taken the time, but its max 0.5 sec to load an article.

To load the site the first time took about 1 sec.

Maybe there is a lot of traffic in certain times of the day?

I guess its nighttime in your part of the world now, and there are less traffic on the lines?

Thanks for taking a look. I'm sure there is a lower volume of web traffic when it's midnight or later here, but I'm encouraged you're getting such a good load-time at any time of day. If you have a chance, please do try it later today, if you can. Of course, it's a Saturday now, and business traffic is lower but residential use is probably higher.

Paulae, take a look at the results the YSLOW firefox/firebug plugin gives you, there are a couple 'F's
also see http://www.wpbeginner.com/wp-tutoria...t-performance/

Very interesting. I confess, though, I don't know how to get a better grade than F on those items. Do I use a plugin to minify/compress JS and CSS? It seems I tried that once a long time ago, and the site shut down. I don't understand how to change the expiry....do I stick that in the options somewhere?

And what to do about a CDN?

I had wp-super cache running until the hosting support guy asked me to disable it. He said some of their other sites had trouble with it. I think he also took off gzip.

All of this is not specificially a theme problem, or is it? Many Atahualpa users complain about speed issues, and I must say, often when click on a link posted here to somebody's Ata site, it does seem slow. So maybe these are problems you and Flynn should be looking at.

Hello again.

I tried your site again, on another computer and also another time of the day, now it took about 5 sec to load the site, and about 4 sec to load an article.

Its 00:15 am here now.

In New Yourk it is 6:15 PM

Thank you, Per. I'm trying very hard to find ways to speed up the site.

Originally Posted by paulae

Thank you, Per. I'm trying very hard to find ways to speed up the site.

Well, I have now tried your site at different times and can`t see any speed problem. I have also tried other news-sites, such as cnn.com, and it uses about the same load time as your site from where I am sitting.

So it seems that the site load faster here in Norway then in the states, maybe you have to move to Europe

Per, thanks again. I had removed the Featurific plugin from the front page, because while it seemed to load faster than Featured Content Gallery, I found it did not work at all in MSIE 8, and requires the user to have the latest version of Flash installed. It looks fine on Safari and Firefox. So I reactivated FCG, which looks better anyway. I guess when you visited last night, FCG was back.

I'm glad the site is loading nicely for you, but I still think it's slow, compared to other sites. Just now, I clicked on cnn.com, and it showed up almost instantaneously. I clicked on my site, and I'd say it was at least 2 seconds before anything at all appeared. It's OK if it takes a while for the page to fully load, as long as there is something to see at the top very quickly.

What is your setup? I'm on Verizon FIOS, which is lightning-fast.

Ok, I decided to do a litte omparisson test of various releases of wordpress and various releases of Atahualpa. This was done on my local machine running

Dual 2 Ghz PowerPC G5
3 GB DDR SDRAM
OSX 10.5.8 on a
Apache/2.2.11
MYSQL 5.0.37
PHP Version 5.2.9

I setup two databases and installed Wordpress 2.7.1 on one and 2.8.4 on the other. I changed the default admin password on both.

I used no plugins except the default ones installed with Wordpress

I added three themes Atahualpa32, Atahualpa333 and Atahualpa344.

I added the following line of code to the bottom of 'footer.php' (just before the </body>) in the three Atahualpa versions and the Default theme:

<?php echo $wpdb->num_queries; ?> <?php _e('queries'); ?>. <?php timer_stop(1); ?> <?php _e('seconds'); ?>

For both sites (Wordpress271 nad Wordpress284
1) I actvated the Default theme and viewed the site and took the reading
2) activated Atahualpa32, visited the site and took the reading
3) activated Atahualpa333, visited the site and took the reading
4) activated Atahualpa344, visited the site and took the reading

Here are the results
2.7.1/default: 22 queries in 0.657 seconds - or 29.86 millisec/query
2.7.1/Atahualpa32: 237 queries in 0.920 seconds - or 3.88 millisec/query
2.7.1/Atahualpa333: 257 queries in 0.922 seconds - or 3.59 millisec/query
2.7.1/Atahualpa344: 281 queries in 1.043 seconds - or 3.71 millisec/query

2.8.4/default: 20 queries in 0.784 seconds - or 39.20 millisec/query
2.8.4/Atahualpa32: 235 queries in 1.025 seconds - or 4.36 millisec/query
2.8.4/Atahualpa333: 253 queries in 1.095 seconds - or 4.33 millisec/query
2.8.4/Atahualpa344: 279 queries in 1.160 seconds - or 4.16 millisec/query

If you use the numbers for the 'default' theme and assume they are overhead and subtract them from the Atahualpa numbers, you get this:

2.7.1/Atahualpa32: 215 queries in 0.263 seconds - or 1.22 millisec/query
2.7.1/Atahualpa333: 235 queries in 0.265 seconds - or 1.13 millisec/query
2.7.1/Atahualpa344: 259 queries in 0.386 seconds - or 1.49 millisec/query

2.8.4/Atahualpa32: 215 queries in 0.241 seconds - or 1.12 millisec/query
2.8.4/Atahualpa333: 233 queries in 0.311 seconds - or 1.33 millisec/query
2.8.4/Atahualpa344: 259 queries in 0.376 seconds - or 1.45 millisec/query

If I ran it again I'm sure i would get variations on each of these numbers.

So there are differences, albeit small ones, between the theme in different flavors running on different versions of WP. But it's very fast, faster on a local machine than on a commercial hosting company, of course.

Do you think our slowness has to do primarily with the number of queries we have, and all the plugins? We want to show a lot of links to a lot of content on the front page, and I've had to cobble together a large group of plugins to accomplish this. Maybe there is a better way to do what we want, but I can't figure it out yet.

Personally, I think there is something inherently slower about WP 2.8.4 than 2.7.1, and maybe it has to do with rendering widgets. Often, when I'm working with the widgets admin, I'll get an error saying a script is not working properly, do I want to continue, debug or stop it. And often, if I add a widget and save it, it will show up on the live page, but back in the widget area, it's not there at all in the list, unless I wait a while and check again. Happened just now when I was trying out BFA Popular Posts.

Paulae--Your site loaded fine for me when I looked at it a wek or so ago (mid day eastern time) and again this morning (930am EST on Sunday)

I am here because I just got an email saying my site is loading very slow. http://www.eyeonannapolis.net Here is the email

John,
You know I love your site. But I have to say I regret everytime I click on your links. I think the pages are too top-heavy with graphics and animation. It takes a good 90 seconds to load your page and another minute to get the controls working.

Maybe it's just me?

Mike

Now he is the onlly one to complain to me; but I know most readers will just move on. I have never experienced the problem either and my traffic still seems to be on the rise.

I am running WP Super Cache

I eventually disabled and deleted wp-cache because the hosting company said they'd had problems with it. I dunno.....

Your site loaded pretty fast for me. No quibbles there. You could enable the timer in the footer config area to be visible either on the page or in the source.

I do think the site is visually cluttered, to the point that I found it hard to concentrate on any one part. And are you aware that, at least on my screen (Macbook Pro 15" laptop, screen resolution set at 1440x900), the top %image is very flattened-out, distorted? It looks to me like the images aren't wide enough for that spot.

If my news site didn't have to accommodate a lot of local businesses who all want their ads on the front page, we wouldn't have so much fading in/out. Visually, it's irritating to many viewers. You've got a lot going on, so you could certainly avoid some of the busy-ness by making your header image static, or have several images which will change only upon refresh or clicking to another part of the site.

Just my opinion, of course!