Levi D. Smith

I was also having slow database response time with my GoDaddy hosting and WordPress. Sometimes my WordPress pages would be quick, but sometimes it would take a half minute or longer for the page just to start rendering.
To figure out the problem, I created a few test pages. The first one was just an HTML page that displayed “Hello World”, which always returned instantaneously. The second was a PHP page that displayed phpinfo(), which also always returned instantaneously. The third one did a simple database query using PHP on the database that was hosting my WordPress site, which just queried “hello” from dual. This page would hang and usually never return. I created a new database on GoDaddy and ran the same page which performed the same query (credentials changed to the new database), and this time it returned the resulting page very quickly. I found that my current WordPress database was on a server running MySQL 5.0, and the new database was running on a different server (according to PHP MyAdmin) running MySQL 5.5. I spent most of the day yesterday setting up a new WordPress site using the new database, and exporting all of the data from my old site into the new one. So far, all of my WordPress pages seem to be responding very quickly, and I haven’t had any of those 30+ second hangups when requesting a page. Most pages seem to load in between 2 and 6 seconds, even the ones that have heavy graphics and screenshots. I think GoDaddy periodically adds better database servers, but if you have to manually migrate your site or else you can be stuck on a old server with poor performance.