Wordpress performance issues

Hi folks,

I've got (amongst other things) a blog hosted here on Dreamhost - http://www.flightsimx.co.uk - built on Wordpress, which is hitting the servers pretty badly. I've had numerous emails from a very helpful chap at Dreamhost trying to resolve the issue, but I've come to a block now.

I've done a lot of site optimisation over the past weeks and performance has improved dramatically - site load time is down from around 30 seconds to around 8. Problem is, Dreamhost still maintain I'm using around twice the server "allowance" for this one blog alone and that's after the optimisation! I've tried disabling plug-ins but that doesn't seem to make any difference (after the initial optimisation).

Anyone got any ideas? I use the OctaGate site timer (http://www.octagate.com/service/SiteTimer/) to measure performance and nothing is jumping out at me as being particularly bad.

I get about 2,500 uniques/5,000 page views a day.

Cheers,

Mark

Do you regularly use Firebug and YSlow?

BTW, you do realise that your page generates 183 http requests, right? Admittedly, only around 30 or so come back to your server.

Just for contrast, my slow blog generates 25 requests, 5 of which are to my server. My fast blog generates 6 requests, 4 of which are to my server.

The front page of your blog runs 10 pages, 4 of which have continuous two-column sidebars. You have 15 articles from your blog on your front page.

You have a very rich and complex site with a lot of great content. My recommendation would be to reduce the number of articles you're displaying on the front page. The "related posts" that you display for every article on the front page is probably somewhat database intensive - particularly since you have 15 articles on the front page.

You can also maybe save a big query by dumping the recent comments in the sidebar.

BTW, Chitaka RPU's plugin for selling related products isn't executed on your server, right?

Finally, as rlparker is likely to suggest, it might be time to put some good indices on your database tables!

What are 50DISK50, 3DOM50, and 1IP1DOM50?
They're Dreamhost coupons!

Thanks for such a detailed response - it is appreciated.

I've reduced the number of posts on the front page to 4 and I've removed the recent comments and related posts from the front page.

I'm not sure what you mean by "The front page of your blog runs 10 pages" - probably due to a hole in my knowledge of Wordpress. Is there any way for me to reduce this?

I've tried Firebug and YSlow in the past, but I'll re-visit them for sure.

No, the RPU isn't executed on my server.

I've done a "optimize tables" on all of the tables in the database. Would that solve the indexing?

Where are you seeing the dreamhost coupons, or is that part of your sig? :)

Sorry for so many questions. There's so much info on Wordpress on the web, it's hard to pick out the "must have" stuff!

Cheers,

Mark

In reply to:
Thanks for such a detailed response - it is appreciated.

Hey, anytime, I'm no expert at Wordpress, but I think I do have some decent performance optimization experience from other applications.

In reply to:
I'm not sure what you mean by "The front page of your blog runs 10 pages" - probably due to a hole in my knowledge of Wordpress. Is there any way for me to reduce this?

No, no, just commenting that I had to scroll down 10 pages to get to the bottom of your front page. That's a pretty big front page. This will probably be solved by your reducing the number of posts on the front page to 4, as you said!

In reply to:
I've done a "optimize tables" on all of the tables in the database. Would that solve the indexing?

No, it's a separate operation. Optimize tables is useful to run occasionally, though, as it cleans things up and also helps the query optimizer to best use the indexes once you've set them up. Oversimplifying, indexes are "lookup tables" used by MySQL to efficiently execute queries that would otherwise take a long time to run. They take up extra space and slow down updates and inserts (new posts, comments, etc), so you don't want to just add them willy-nilly. You do want to look at every query being executed against the database and make sure that the ones that hit big tables are using an index in order to avoid a full table scan.

Read this post from the Wordpress forum for some insight into the problem. The last few posts really do explain why unoptimized plugins are the bane of good Wordpress performance.

Basically, you'll want to do some analysis against your Wordpress database - a great opportunity to learn a very high-paying skillset!

In reply to:
Where are you seeing the dreamhost coupons, or is that part of your sig? :)

:) The italics aren't enough? wink

What are 50DISK50, 3DOM50, and 1IP1DOM50?
They're Dreamhost coupons!

BTW, I now count 7 articles on the front page.

What's the deal with the "page 1 of 177" there on the front page - along with the whole pagination widget? Is this part of some theme? It looks nonstandard and is a bit fishy to me, as I imagine that it might take a lot of queries to generate an accurate pagecount.

What are 50DISK50, 3DOM50, and 1IP1DOM50?
They're Dreamhost coupons!

Wordpress performance issues