Site speed: anatomy of a page request

  • hamstair_toilichte

    (@hamstair_toilichte)


    10 years ago

    I run four WP sites on three different hosts, three of which are grinding to a snails pace. I need to speed them up, and I have googled for tips to increase speed and am slowly implementing them to see what happens.

    Before I’m told to RTFM, RTFFAQ, RTFForum, deactivate all themes and plugins, and ultimately to destroy the site and rebuild it, phoenix-like, my query isn’t to do with tips to increase speed, but is rather about what’s happening when WP handles a page request. If I have a better idea of the queries and other operations that WP runs when it loads a page, then I’ll be better placed to diagnose my site speed problems, and to understand why the various speed tips, such as removing plugins, are supposed to work. Without this inside info, I rather feel that I’m fumbling in the dark.

    So, are there docs in the voluminous and gynormous Codex which describe what’s happening under the bonnet (‘hood’ to youse across the Pond) when a page request is made? For instance, what SQL queries are run on which tables?

    I’ve not cited any of my sites because I don’t want advice on them, or to try to get free technical support. I’m just after information as to the inner workings of WP…

    I have over a decade’s MySQL and PHP experience, so I’m happy to devour tech docs. Thanks for any pointers.

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
  • phe.le

    (@phele)

    Hi there,

    I would say that the WordPress developers are very good at what they do, so I wouldn’t worry about what’s going on with their core files. Most sites are slow because the themes are not well coded or the sites are being hosted on a slow server. I’ve worked on many different sites hosting many different places, but I have been successfully making them faster by using the W3 Total Cache plugin and follow recommendations from Google PageSpeed Insights.

    https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/w3-total-cache/
    https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/

    Thread Starter hamstair_toilichte

    (@hamstair_toilichte)

    Thanks for the reply. I have tried the cache plugin you suggested, as it’s very popular, but not only did it do nothing for the speed, it knackered the appearance of the home page of my main site so I had to hastily withdraw it. I’ve got Wordfence Pro running on that site and have turned on its ‘Falcon’ cacheing engine which claims a 50-fold speed improvement, but I’ve only seen marginal gains. I did run the Google speed tools which were interesting, but IIRC the advice wasn’t so useful for WP sites (eg minifying JS and CSS, HTML code tweaking). I’ll give it another go on a couple of sites and do as much tweaking as I can within the WP confines.

    However, this to me is like fiddling around in the engine with a blindfold on, hence my request. My slow sites are taking 20 or more seconds to initially respond to a page request, in that the browser is ‘waiting for <domain>’, the tab (in FF) has “connecting”, and the circle is rotating anti-clockwise, all of which indicates that the browser’s waiting for data. Once it gets it and the circle goes clockwise, then rendering’s fairly quick. What I really could do with knowing is what’s going on at the server end during the ‘connecting’ phase, but unfortunately my sites are on hosting accounts and I don’t have any shell access, let alone direct log access.

    I have been disabling plugins, removing redundant themes, tidying up posts, removing third-party links (eg FB/Twitter like buttons), etc, as recommended by various sites (this is one of many examples), but it’s very much a suck-it-and-see approach without knowing what’s going on. It’s the ignorance that’s driving me potty. There are also some plugins (such as membership plugins) and themes which are crucial to my sites which I can’t disable.

    In general, I’d just like to know more about what WP is up to. I’ve recently been learning Joomla, and it positively seems to whizz along compared to WP even though it’s a far heftier beast.

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
  • The topic ‘Site speed: anatomy of a page request’ is closed to new replies.