WordPress Core Load Time

According to P3, the Load time for wordpress core is 2 secs

A few things to help put this in context:

• Look at the margin of error. The measurement time is approximate.
• Take repeated measurements. The load times will probably vary on your server depending on time of day and day of week
• The pages that P3 chooses are particularly tough admin pages. The “all posts” page is one of the slowest pages in he admin, the plugins page has to read all of the meta information from every plugin file you have installed (even if they’re not activated)
• P3 also clears out your opcode cache. If you look at advanced settings and uncheck “attempt to disable opcode optimizers” you may get a faster reading. The totals will be more reflective of your real site, but the pie chart (for plugins) will be off or incomplete.

The best thing you can do to speed up your admin in most environments is to install an object cache. You should ask your host if they support eaccelerator, apc, xcache, wincache, memcached, or zend optimizer plus, and try to find a corresponding object cache plugin on the repository.

Thank for reply,

I checked the margin error and its quite low.
Total Load Time: 6.1250seconds avg.
Site Load Time 4.0484seconds avg.
Profile Overhead: 2.0767seconds avg.
Plugin Load Time: 1.9800seconds avg.
Theme Load Time: 0.0441seconds avg.
Core Load Time: 1.9298seconds avg.
Margin of Error: 0.0944seconds avg.
(6.1250 observed, 6.0306 expected)
Visits: 2
Number of PHP ticks: 18,658 calls avg.
Memory Usage: 54.63 MB avg.
MySQL Queries: 121 queries avg.

Moreover I am checking only 2 pages for admin panel (funny cause those are the posts and pages ), because the moderator who are going to add posts and modify pages will look on those most often.

As for the caching I use W3 total cache with Object Cache enabled (isnt it enought? ). As for site its great, but is admin cached fully? I will look into the ones which you suggested.

I have to add that as for now number of pages and posts is really small (around 60 pages and 10 posts), so what will happen when there will be 60 pages and 600 posts, I do not want to end with admin panel not accessible.

I tried uninstalling plugins (which off course disabled the time for plugins, but the core load time was still around 2 secs).

I also tried the option you mentioned (opcode optimizers) and still the same. Moreover I tried changing to default theme (the same results, or even worse ?? )

So Im kind of stuck, maybe the PHP ticks should be blamed, or the memory (unfortunately I already tries to maximize that – no luck – my server provider doesnt allow it to be more than 64MB ;/ ) Do you think it can be the problem?

Thanks in advance

Oh I think I finally found the problem – W3_Total_Cache Object Cache.
Which is strange, when it is enabled, the page loads really slow (which is the opposite of this feature ;/ ) – but this problem I will look in that plugins support.

Still thanks for reply, and I hope you can guide me with additional questions regarding PHP ticks and memory.

I changed object-cache.php with the one from APC Object Cache Backend plugin, and here are results(which looks definetely better):

Total Load Time: 4.2819seconds avg.
Site Load Time 1.7686seconds avg.
Profile Overhead: 2.5133seconds avg.
Plugin Load Time: 1.0273seconds avg.
Theme Load Time: 0.0345seconds avg.
Core Load Time: 0.5963seconds avg.
Margin of Error: 0.1105seconds avg.
(4.2819 observed, 4.1714 expected)
Visits: 2
Number of PHP ticks: 22,967 calls avg.
Memory Usage: 55.83 MB avg.
MySQL Queries: 125 queries avg.

This definitely looks better! I’m glad the APC backend is working for you! Let me know if you have any further questions.

To answer your questions on PHP Ticks: Ticks are php’s internal representation of executable operations. Basically more ticks = php is doing more things. A complex section of code = more ticks, more plugins = more ticks, a more complex theme (referring only to php code) = more ticks.

However, more ticks doesn’t mean “slower.” For example, converting a string to upper case is fast, but reading a file is slow, and it’s the about the same number of ticks.

This metric answers the question of “how much complex do plugins add to my site?” You can see the change in ticks by activating/deactivating plugins and re-measuring. It definitely needs to be used in context of all the other metrics.

For memory, the main concern is that you’ll run out (hit php’s memory limit). If you hit the memory limit, you’ll know it because you’ll see a fatal error for that request.

Using too much memory won’t make your site slow unless it starts swapping (using the hard drive for more memory). This isn’t something you (as a user) can control, or can affect since memory is shared among all the users, websites, and processes on the server.