wp-core hitting 700 queries ?!

So I just decided to move from Mambo CMS to WordPress. It’s been a challenge and it took a couple months to get things correct but it’s done mostly, just some minor formatting issues to deal with.

My site is running very slow. It’s a clean install, and actually I re-installed it twice now to try and fix the problem.

I’m not new to wordpress, I’ve got several sites of my own and I’ve done several sites for others but I’ve never ran into this problem.

I ran the P3 Plugin Performance Profiler on my site and I see that wp-core is the issue and I can’t figure it out. It’s hitting over 700 queries and it takes almost 18 seconds to load wp-core which is ridiculous. According to P3 it’s actually the Wp-Core/admin that is taking so long.

I’ve sat and timed it, there are times on the dashboard that it will take over 2 minutes after I hit say ‘Posts’ for the page to actually come up. It’s so slow I just can’t do anything. I don’t think it’s the host as my other sites are on the same hosting service.

The site doesn’t have a lot of content but they’re big posts as it’s a review site. It’s got 965 posts total as of now. I’m only running 15 plugins live and they take .419 seconds to load, so they’re not the issue obviously. I’ve also turned every plugin off and ended up with the same thing with wp-core.

I have another site with over 2200 posts, mostly news and PR with some larger reviews mixed in and 20 plugins live. According to P3 it only takes .6 second to load WP-Core and it maxes out at 194 queries. Total site load time is only about .65 seconds.

So can anyone tell me why wp-core admin is hitting over 700 queries and slowing my site to a crawl and what can I do about it?

I’ve re-installed a few times now and it’s the same.

Yes I’ve optimized the database, I actually cut the size of the database in almost half, it was 58mb now it’s 36mb and I’ve removed any extraneous stuff that might be left over from mambo in the site and database. The database is only 36mb in size and the faster site I mentioned actually has a larger database at 41mb.

I can usually figure out any problems with sites and I don’t ask for help, but this has me stumped totally and I’m stuck. Please help me…