300% slowdown when elementor is turned on, ideas?

  • Resolved alien1691

    (@alien1691)


    5 years, 10 months ago

    Greetings.

    I have been asked to evaluate and improve a site who has undergone a dramatic performance drop (uncached pages now run at a glacial 30s. pageload time: caching is now so aggressive that the site is almost static, except for from posts). The system (DBMS, CPU, memory) shows no particular pathology. Running wordpess 5.1.1, with a a variant of linstar king-theme. Php is an ancient 5.6 but bumping it up to 7.1 (the most that can be done on that OS) gains “only” a 30% (so 30 secs become 20, nothing to write home about). So I resorted to xdebug profiling noticed that most time appeared to be spent inside elementor (Control_Stack->{get_init_settings,get_value,is_control_visible}, mostly).

    Turning off elementor and elementor-pro do in fact boost page load to 7 secs ( still slow, but way better). Turning the page builder off cannot be the solution, however, so I am banking on finding some plugin conflict.

    Problem is , I have to test on the live production site, and turning every plugin off and then turn them on one by one is not really an option (customer insists on having the site functional most/all of the time).

    I am therefore turning to the forum to ask if the setup triggers some suggestions (plugin list at end).

    Cheers,
    Alessandro

    – this is the list of installed plugins:

    active plugins:

    advanced-custom-fields
    advanced-custom-field-repeater-collapser
    akismet
    broken-link-checker
    classic-editor
    contact-form-7
    contact-form-7-dynamic-text-extension
    contact-form-7-to-database-extension
    custom-permalinks
    easy-google-fonts
    elementor
    elementor-pro
    email-log
    enable-media-replace
    toolkit-for-envato
    google-analytics-for-wordpress
    iubenda-cookie-law-solution
    LayerSlider
    linstar-helper
    media-library-assistant
    meta-box
    noindex-pages
    pinterest-widget-plus
    post-duplicator
    post-grid
    regenerate-thumbnails
    all-in-one-schemaorg-rich-snippets
    showcase-visual-composer-addon
    wp-smush-pro
    templatera
    title-and-nofollow-for-links
    updraftplus
    user-role-editor
    js_composer
    wp-fastest-cache
    wp-htaccess-editor
    sitepress-multilingual-cms
    wpmudev-updates
    wp-seo-structured-data-schema
    yith-custom-login
    wordpress-seo-premium

    inactive plugins:
    backupwordpress
    custom-post-type-ui
    events-manager
    inbound-contact-form-7
    inbound-pro
    landing-pages
    solid-code-theme-editor
    the-events-calendar
    ultimate-landing-page
    w3-total-cache
    wordfence
    wordpress-reset
    wpml-cms-nav
    wpml-media-translation
    wpml-string-translation
    wpml-translation-management
    wp-rocket

    The page I need help with: [log in to see the link]

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)

  • Take a look at the site through a page speed test such as gtmetrix – https://gtmetrix.com/reports/www.flordepacifico.com/AwBtfLTN

    The details will help determine how to solve speed problems.

    Also, https://docs.elementor.com/article/286-speed-up-a-slow-site is a good guide with tips on various things you can do as well. Many of those tips are not specific to Elementor, but one mentioned near the bottom of the article is – Switch editor loading method.

    Hi,

    Here are my thoughts:

    1. Take a full backup and migrate it into a subfolder/staging.
    That way you can investigate, clean up and troubleshoot, without bothering the live site.

    2. I get a bit dizzy, just looking at that tremendous long list of plugins.
    First thing I would do is clean up as much as possible, everything that is not absolutely necessary has to go!

    3. I see you have two captains on one ship, that is an absolute no go if you ask me.
    Decide whether to work with Elementor or with Visual composer, not both. Never a good idea to have two plugins that do pretty much the same thing in one site. Sooner or later thay are bound to cause trouble and slow down the site is one of them.

    4. php 7.2. is a must. Elementor and most other up to date plugins do no longer work well or not at all under the old 5.6.

    5. after hopefully having cleaned up as much plugins as you can, take a look at the database and clean that up too ( in staging version ). a cluttered database can slow down a site big time too.

    6. Make sure the site runs on decent hosting, that has enough power to run such a large, multilanguage site.

    7. install a good caching plugin

    8. consider putting the clean site on a CDN like cloudflare.

    9. make sure all images are optimized, if not run a plugin like imagify and start optimizing the images.

    These things should make a big difference!

    Not sure if you have taken some measures allready, but I visit your site just now and it loads pretty fast??

    The test in GTmetrix is still nog great but way better to what you wrote in the original post:

    https://www.screencast.com/t/ywFBle7Xtf

    • This reply was modified 5 years, 10 months ago by LogoLogics.
    Thread Starter alien1691

    (@alien1691)

    Greetings, and thanks to all those who answered.
    As it turned out, the improvement brought on by disabling elementor was a red herring. Truth be told, searching for reasons in WP was a red herring.

    I’ll leave the deatils for a long winter evening, however, the reason for the horrible perf. was xdebug. Yes, xdebug had been installed on the server but (and in my mind that’s a pretty big but) it was not enabled.

    This means that libxdebug was being loaded in the server, but with all its functions disabled. It would look like that makes one pay (about) the cost of an additional test around funcalls or somesuch. Wrong. Installing the thing (in that environemnt, @least) means getting a 6-to-10x overhead on everything, including command line PHP (that’s how I found it, BTW). For the interested, it appears that the additional time is spent in making thousands og gettimeofday() syscalls, so it could be related to profiling (which is also off in .ini, for what’s worth – nothing, as it turns out).

    Hopefully this will help someone else.

    Very interesting. Thanks for letting us know.

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
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