WordPress Admin Suddenly Impossibly Slow

  • Resolved emilycapito

    (@emilycapito)


    11 years ago

    My site is blog.emilycapito.com

    I am so sick about this situation – any help would be very much appreciated and please keep it in layman’s terms – I need step by step.

    I have been running my blog on wordpress with hosting through godaddy for over a year. I have never had this issue. A few weeks ago I switched themes to the Genesis Framework and website developer did the work to set up my site. It’s worked beautifully until yesterday. Nothing changed between the transition to Genesis and now and it’s been at least two weeks. I am on every other day, at least.

    When I login to the admin it takes forever and often throws a 500 server error. In navigating through any part of the admin panel – same thing. It takes 1-3 minutes to move from page to page and at least a third of the time, the whole thing times out and throws the server error.

    I started by calling GoDaddy yesterday and they reported that everything was fine on their end. They can pull up the site on both their in network and out of network computers, so sent me to look for a bad plugin.

    The problem became exponentially worse today when I actually spent a good deal of time creating a blog post this afternoon and so I called them up again. Got a good rep this time who really looked at everything and couldn’t find any reason on their end that the issue is occurring. They indicated that the server error is a continuous connection error (?) indicating that numerous connections were trying to be made simultaneously and that a plugin must be looping or something.

    They advised to deactivate plugins one by one. I have 27 plugins (most are very simple – one for the favicon, one for the contact form, etc). I deleted all the inactive plugins and deactivated about 10 others before reading a post that suggested renaming the plugins folder via FTP so that you can test whether it is even a plugin issue.

    I was very hopeful that things would return to normal speed once I did this, but alas, no. In fact, I didn’t even get to test anything before I got the following errors:

    W3 Total Cache Error: some files appear to be missing or out of place. Please re-install plugin or remove /home/content/29/10122729/html/blog/wp-content/advanced-cache.php.
    Warning: Cannot modify header information – headers already sent by (output started at /home/content/29/10122729/html/blog/wp-content/advanced-cache.php:23) in /home/content/29/10122729/html/blog/wp-includes/pluggable.php on line 876

    I assume these errors have resulted from the renaming of the plugins folder, so I am back to square one and renamed the file back to the correct name.

    I have already entered increased memory (128MB) into the wp-config.php file as was a solution to another user’s similar issue to no effect.

    Another user mentioned port 80 being blocked by a firewall by the host (https://www.ads-software.com/support/topic/wp-admin-even-33-incredibly-slow/page/2). This seemed to click since the server error reads: “Internal Server Error…Apache Server at blog.emilycapito.com Port 80”. I have called GoDaddy again specifically to demand they look for anything blocking or delaying php requests through port 80 – nothing.

    I did run it through gtmetrix as recommended:
    Page Speed Grade: C 79%
    YSlow Grade: A 90%

    Top Issues:
    Combine images using CSS sprites (lists my 6 social media icons) – F
    Inline small Javascript (lists one long link to inline) – E
    Serve scaled images (2 images are being resized by CSS) – D
    Inline small CSS – D
    Optimize Images – C

    Everything else is an A or a B.

    Pingdom’s load time test – I get a wide range from 2.2 seconds to over 60 seconds – depending on whether the admin pages are trying to do something. There are 30 requests to load the home page. Domain size 377kb, nearly all images.

    I have deactivated all plugins at this point.

    I deleted all unnecessary images in case its a memory problem.

    I have tried to review the “logs” – the Apache Logs contain lines and lines and lines of indiscernible information. I don’t see anything specific to errors and I honestly have no idea what I am looking at. The “Error Logs” folder has nothing in it.

    Will the change in speed be instantaneous once I find/disable the source or do I have to clear my cache with every single change and/or open a new browser to test whether it had an impact? (please god no)

    The website developer I used to build the site is going through some kind of medical treatment and while I have an email out to her, she is pretty inaccessible. I can’t wait until she comes back online to get my admin panel working again!

    Read that some ISPs can “filter” port 80, so going to attempt to find someone with a brain at Centurylink tomorrow morning to see if they changed anything over there. Seems like a long shot.

    What should I try next?

Viewing 5 replies - 16 through 20 (of 20 total)

  • Contact your hosting and they will see it is a database issue. Once when we had very slow WordPress, hosting guys informed that some database tables had crashed, they repaired the database and all was well.

    @emilycapito:

    Just do a search on the file. If it were me I’d ssh to the server and just grep the lot ??

    grep -R header.png *

    Done!

    Thread Starter emilycapito

    (@emilycapito)

    Thanks, P.Chandra – I am on hold with them now – finger crossed!

    WPRanger – That sounds like a nifty as heck trick! Do you know of a dummy tut (only finding pretty adv stuff) – here’s where I’m at:
    – Not sure what SSH is, but it looks like I would need to download Putty to use SSH to connect to my server (I’m on Windows 7)
    – Went to the download site and it indicates I need my SSH credentials for the thing to work – would my host supply these?

    Thanks!

    Thread Starter emilycapito

    (@emilycapito)

    GoDaddy was of little help – they did FINALLY confirm that the live site load time issues were due to “latency on specific nodes on the grid that they are working to smooth out” but blame the 500 server errors on WordPress.

    This doesn’t make sense since the server errors appear at the same time that the load times jump and only when I am performing some action on the admin side (deactivating a plugin, activating a theme, etc). Denied any issues (filtering, firewall, etc) that could impact PHP activity through port 80. Denied any database issues.

    I do think I found the SSH info while exploring in my hosting panel, so going to attempt to fix the other issue of the mystery PNG file now while I wait to see if I get another server error, having reactivated a group of plugins.

    I really appreciate everyone’s input and suggestions thus far. My hope is that this is a GoDaddy issue that they refuse to acknowledge and that the grid “latency” issues were and are the source of the server errors when I was trying to work in the backend.

    Thread Starter emilycapito

    (@emilycapito)

    No problems for the last couple of hours, so marking as resolved. Will reopen if the mystery server errors reappear in the next little bit. Never found the offended image code – SHS was just over my head, so sent a request off to my website programmer to look into when she can.

    Thanks all.

Viewing 5 replies - 16 through 20 (of 20 total)
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