After upgrade to 2.7 – very slow

@otto42

Yup. I tested all of the transports and the self DNS lookup and they all work fine.

I don’t understand why wp-cron.php would be hit so much, shouldn’t it only run a few times a day? I guess there could be a plugin that causes it to fire more frequently?

Well, first, I’d say to figure out what the problem is, and then tell us that.

that’s not really helpful.
i said in my post that nothing changed with my server AT ALL from 2.7 to 2.71 EXCEPT the actual upgrade.

so i didn’t change anything that should be causing a problem.

whatever is new in the code from 2.7.1 is what’s causing the problem.

is that really hard to understand?

and there is no way for me to determine what was changed in the code with 2.7.1

i said in my post that nothing changed with my server AT ALL from 2.7 to 2.71 EXCEPT the actual upgrade.

What you’re failing to understand here is that this is not really helpful either. The fact that you changed something and it behaves differently now is not surprising, and doesn’t point to the underlying problem.

whatever is new in the code from 2.7.1 is what’s causing the problem.
is that really hard to understand?

Okay, I’m going to try to make this simple as I can.

You’re thinking “I changed X, now it’s broken, therefore the new X is the cause”. This is incorrect. We know this is incorrect, because 2.7.1 runs perfectly fast and fine on many, many other systems, so the problem cannot be totally there. All you’re considering is your particular system, not the totality of all WordPress’ everywhere. If there really was a problem in 2.7.1 with slowdowns, then everybody would get it and it would be rapidly found and fixed, right?

See, the fact that WordPress is now behaving differently than it did before is not surprising, because it’s a new version, with many changes. One of these changes is triggering something else in your underlying structure to cause the slowdowns you’re experiencing.

So the problem is somewhere in your specific setup. In other words, something else on your system is fundamentally incompatible with the changes in WordPress 2.7.1. This doesn’t mean that 2.7.1 is wrong, it means that something else on your system is incompatible. That incompatible part needs to be discovered.

Once you know where the problem is, then perhaps a new patch can be created to address that problem. Or the incompatible part can be fixed. Or whatever, the point being that until you know where the problem actually *is*, you don’t know anything useful.

Knowing what you changed doesn’t give you any useful information about what is actually broken. If I change my hinges and my door is uneven and this causes a pane of glass in it to break, then just fixing the hinges won’t replace the glass as well.

So, you have three options:
1. Roll back to 2.7.
2. Find the problem in 2.7.1 and tell us what it is.
3. Stop using WordPress and switch to some other piece of software.

Take your pick. And notice that running in circles while endless saying “it’s broken, it’s broken, what do I do?!??!” is not an option. Complaining about a problem generally makes the problem last longer, because instead of developing, those people who could be figuring it out are now reading your rants and probably deciding to ignore you instead.

Constructive criticism is perfectly welcome. However, what you’re doing is not constructive.

Also, and this is just a tip which you are free to ignore: If you’re not capable of determining the problem on your server, then perhaps you should go find somebody who is capable of doing that, and give them access, and have them do so. If you then want to share with us what the problem is, we’d be glad to fix it. But if you’re not willing to actually help out in that way or some other constructive manner, then you’re pretty much going to have to sit and wait until it’s fixed.

PS. I am not trying to be rude or anything, I’m just being straight with you and telling you how it is. No offense is taken or intended.

Otto: two things.

1. As I understand, the new WP 2.7 dashboard makes a more heavy usage of java. From what I see, this is slowing down operations on the backend quite a lot. Indeed, it even feels slower than 2.6 when installed locally. Posts take longer to process, switching between modules takes longer.

2. PHP calls. I’m seeing more time in PHP GET requests than previous installations – and this is on many different webhosts. This might also tie into caching issues, as well.

The bottom line is, for me, and maybe for these other users pointing out that they’ve seen slowdown since upgrading, that 2.7’s extra bells seem to be causing slowdown. Moreover, a 2.7 install running the usual gamut of WP speed-up plugins, such as WP super cache, PHP speedy, and a .htaccess that’s been “streamlined” still feels sluggish.

We can’t all tell you the exact things that go down, we can only tell you what we see, and what we suspect. We know that you guys work hard at what you do, and you’ve made a great format with WP. We also know that it can’t all work for everyone, the nature of software states that that is just not really possible. But, we do also know that when we see and feel a difference between a previous upgrade and a new one, it is a real thing, not just a bunch of people imagining things (not that you suggest this, but many WP forum contributors have).

That’s just my thoughts – as I say, I could be wrong – but the extra java usage for menus and the like, combined with something in PHP calls just seemingly hitting a bottleneck, are the things that I see.

Try going to add/remove programs, delete what you can and then go accessories, clean disk, defrag.

@brianbotkiller: “Javascript”. Not “Java”. These are two different things, and the difference is somewhat important here.

2.7 doesn’t do significantly more AJAX work than 2.6 did. One or two extra requests, maybe, but not a huge amount.

The differences in the HTTP API could be the underlying issue (as that’s what most of the AJAX requests do), but there’s ways to diagnose and fix that, some of which have been covered in this thread.

> 1. Roll back to 2.7.

I rolled back to 2.6.3. My slowdowns started with 2.7.

Take your pick. And notice that running in circles while endless saying “it’s broken, it’s broken, what do I do?!??!” is not an option. Complaining about a problem generally makes the problem last longer, because instead of developing, those people who could be figuring it out are now reading your rants and probably deciding to ignore you instead.

Otto,

Maybe instead of constantly counter-ranting, you might be more productive or constructive walking people through how to diagnose the problem the problem on their servers and track down the source of the incompatibility.

Counter-rants are no better or no more useful than rants.

Minger: Most people don’t have the skills needed to be able to figure out these sort of problems on their own. It takes some amount of technical knowledge, which is not easily explained via a simple text medium such as a forum. Furthermore, if they’re on shared or third party hosting then they likely don’t have the necessary level of access to be able to do it anyway.

In other words, I can’t walk them through it. They need somebody who understands web servers to get access to their systems and then figure out where the problem lies for them. Once the problem is identified, then a patch can be created to work around it or the fix can be made to their systems.

Also, nothing I said was a “rant”. Just a statement of facts.

All i can say right now is that Otto has been one of the most “un” helpful moderators i have ever encountered.

We realize that wordpress is a free product but it’s also supposed to be something that the average it joe can setup and get running with minimal fuss.

when it was working on previous versions and i have my own server that i’m running this on and i say nothing has changed, then it would be nice to know BEFORE i upgrade that something has changed on the wordpress side of things that MIGHT cause some problems on my upgrade.

guess i’m going back to 2.65 for awhile until this is figured out.
funny how there is a 4 page post about these problems but in otto’s world this is just a minor problem in the community.

WordPress 2.7 has been downloaded over 3 million times (coming up on 4 million now: https://www.ads-software.com/download/counter/ ).

So yes, this is a “minor” problem, not experienced by everybody.

If you have a specific problem, I’ll try to help you. But with a non-specific problem, then I’ll try to get you to break it down to specifics for me. Is this so difficult to do?

Same problem here (www.fridaynet.ch). Very slow (minutes) both on dashboard and on website. Sometimes it works normal.
Just updated to wp 2.7.1, nothing changed.

WP Tuner says problems with widgets_init (189 ms). I have no widget (still using old theme, a slightly edited default, from wp 2.0.something).
Firebug simply says the time to get “200 OK”, but no Net problems. It reports some errors on some admin pages (some code error, do not understand if it’s a code problem or a Firebug problem).

Slowness began some week after hosting service changed the server (wp was already 2.7 for a while), but they kept same configuration. Many other website (no wp) on same host do not have any problems.
Server details, from plugin diagnosis, are:
Linux OS
PHP 4.4.4-8+etch6
MySQL 5.0.32-Debian_7etch6-log
Apache/2.2.3 (Debian) mod_ssl/2.2.3 OpenSSL/0.9.8c
I can provide further configuration information if needed.

No idea how to solve/diagnose the problem, help is welcome.

Thanks,
Marco.

I’ll add my name to the list of WP 2.7.1 users with slow, server heavy installations.

I’m with Media Temple and my GPU usage has almost doubled since installing 2.7.1. That’s costing me an additional $80 per month for hosting, when my traffic is not substantially different than it was before 2.7.1.

Here’s a snapshot of my GPU usage for today so far (8 hours worth of data):

Path HTTP response Hits IORead IOWrite GPUs / hit %of total GPUs

flightsimx.co.uk/index.php 200 1046 163207 2317 0.0014 10.85% 1.4984

flightsimx.co.uk/wp-cron.php 200 811 118022 1527 0.0015 8.53% 1.1789

wp-cron.php seems to be having an adverse affect for sure.

I’ve tried all the usual – added WP Super Cache, removed all non-essential plugins, optimised the database etc.

If whatever the problem is isn’t fixed soon, I’m gonna have to look at another platform – I can’t afford this much for my hosting!

Mark

@psionmark

I’m on MediaTemple too and having a similar problem with both the admin area and the main site. And wp-cron is the number one GPU hog on my site as well.

Still looking for a solution…

First step to solving wp-cron related issues is to look in the database for the “cron” option, in the options table. What is the value associated with that option? In general, it should be empty. If it’s getting filled up, then wp-cron is probably not executing properly, but you need to examine it to see what’s trying to run but can’t run.