Looking for Tips on Improving Performance

  • Hi all,

    I have a WordPress 3.5 multisite install using W3 Total Cache with all features except Js Minify switched on – Page cache, css minify, self-hosted cdn… pretty much the works. However, my site is still painfully slow! I can’t use Js Minify (yet) because it breaks if I switch on Auto-minify. I’ll need to go in and add the Js files one by one with the minify set to manual.

    However, I would still hope that the site would at least show some performance improvement with most of W3TC switched on? YSlow tells me that I’m not using Gzip – although this shouldn’t be the case. I’m not looking for support on W3TC as such, otherwise would post in their forum. What I’m looking for is any tips on how to investigate further and get to the root of the issues?

    Any suggestions from folks experienced in this kind of work very gratefully received. The site is at https://www.harrowdirect.co.uk

    Thanks,
    Dee

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  • It depends, are you on shared hosting, on dedicated, or serving from your own machine ? What’s your technical level ? I can’t tell if all of my suggestions would be useful, but here’s a handful ??

    You may install another blog in a subdir, and for that blog you’d have just one blog post, and no plugin or additional theme, all default.
    If it works way faster than your current blog, then, yeah, you might find things to fix.

    Testing with all plugins off, and if there’s a performance gap, reactivate them one by one.

    Read your web hosting’s apache error log, if that is possible. If you see some error repeatidly coming back, there might be a field for investigation.

    If your hosting account also allows it, get stats from your hosting account : are you maxxing CPU usage, are you maxxing the allowed number of Apache threads (that’s a killer for a blog, requires increasing max threads value but only if the CPU and RAM allow it), do you still have free RAM, are there Mysql slow queries (ideally : no, if yes : the server’s not up to the job), what is the HTTP loadtime of a page (on a dedi it’s below 1 second, on decent shared hosting it shouldn’t be below 2 seconds)…
    Edit : on a dedi, there’s nothing as awesome as Munin, for monitoring the data that matters.

    If you can make a copy of your blog to another hosting provider, and update the DNS to point to the other hosting account : do you see a performance gap ? There are evil web hosts putting you on a crappy server/cluster, this may happen.

    That should be plenty ??

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