Appalling performance using WordPress

Does anyone else see atrocious performance when using WordPress on Dreamhost? If so, do you have any pointers as to how one might get a site to load in under 15 seconds?

Tech Support have offered very little other than laughably basic recommendations (like 'turn on the caching system' etc.)

Every instance of WordPress I have running on their boxes takes upward of 10 seconds to load when I first hit the site. This is appalling. Once I hit the site the first time, the cache kicks in and we are down to about 1-2 seconds per page load.

I'd guess at some issue with the mySQL connection or resolving the mySQL host internally - but who knows?

It certainly is NOT my connection or local DNS.

Any pointers, people? Thanks! :)

I don't have any pointers but have suffered a similar experience.

www.savefrystreet.com
www.oaksclass.com
www.kaonevar.com

www.savefrystreet.com loaded blazing fast for me, as did oaksclass and kaonevar. They all took 2-3 seconds for the first hint of a site to respond, then about .5 seconds for the screen to be generated.

-Scott

Thanks for chipping in, my man.

I didn't have the same response time as Scott. www.kaonevar.com took 5-6 seconds from two independent connections. www.savefrystreet.com and www.oaksclass.com were a little quicker. But they all appear sooner than my sites.

Would you try this one as an example...

http://www.readersrevenge.com/bookblog/

About 3 seconds from hitting Enter to fully loaded. I should probably mention that I live within 20 miles of the DreamHost datacenter.

As another yardstick, I timed a 'curl' fetch (no graphics) of the bookblog page and am getting 1-2 seconds.

-Scott

Interesting, and thanks!

Now all I need to do is to convince the majority of my readers to move to within 20 miles of the DH data center and all my problems will be solved! :))

Your site took three seconds to load in Internet Explorer and two in Firefox, timing from the moment I hit return in the address bar. I live in England.

I don't have any experience of WordPress to guess as what's up, but I figured you might like to know geography isn't causing the issues.

http://www.readersrevenge.com/bookblog/ took about 2 seconds to come up for me. Have you tried a traceroute to see if you might be getting hammered by some latency?

--rlparker

Hi,

Thanks for the replies people. It's at least some comfort that people in a few other locations appear not to be suffering similar lag.

Here's a traceroute output:

$ traceroute -vn readersrevenge.com
traceroute to readersrevenge.com (66.33.219.90), 64 hops max, 40 byte packets
1 75.24.15.254 36 bytes to my_box 6.372 ms 5.992 ms 5.577 ms
2 66.73.114.226 36 bytes to my_box 7.724 ms 6.264 ms 6.276 ms
3 66.73.114.99 36 bytes to my_box 202.529 ms 140.915 ms 198.12 ms
4 151.164.43.96 36 bytes to my_box 13.942 ms 14.125 ms 13.660 ms
5 151.164.43.253 36 bytes to my_box 14.204 ms 13.658 ms 14.190 ms
6 151.164.42.139 36 bytes to my_box 14.984 ms 14.296 ms 14.908 ms
7 * * *
8 67.17.162.162 36 bytes to my_box 66.30 ms 66.146 ms 66.367 ms
9 66.33.219.90 48 bytes to my_box 65.832 ms 66.369 ms 66.132 ms


But isn't this like comparing apples and oranges (comparing the transit of small UDP packets with the transit of packets from an HTTP GET request?) Also, node 7 either doesn't like returning ICMP time exceeded packets, or is configured with too small a TTL... make of it what you will. Thanks...

In reply to:

---

But isn't this like comparing apples and oranges (comparing the transit of small UDP packets with the transit of packets from an HTTP GET request?)

---

To some degree I suppose that is true, but it will at least tell you whether you have a serious connectivity problem from your machine to the site - either confirming (or eliminating?) that as *one* possible source of slow page loading. I only suggested it since others (myself included) had "good" repsonses.

That said, your traceroute doesn't look *too* bad; I'd be a little concerned about hop 3 at 202.5 ms, and if that is *consistent*, I'd talk to my ISP - maybe they have a "borked" router. Standards of acceptability vary greatly among ISP's, but I think your "slowest" links should be not greater than 50 ms for the ISP to be said to have "reasonable" latency.

Which brings up the "sluggish" hops 8 and 9 - at Dreamhost. While I think that should be better, in the "real world" I can't see that contributing much to a delay in displaying the page. I suppose it could be indicative of a DH network issue that is only magnified "invisibly" by DH having to run around within it's network to retrieve the MySQL data from the MySQL servers in order to display the WordPress page, but then the rest of us should also be seeing "bad" load times, and that doesn't appear to be the case.

--rlparker

At the moment they did, but more and more frequently are they slow loaders. Even my tracking site has outtages or times when they load slow.

www.savefrystreet.com
www.oaksclass.com
www.kaonevar.com

Yeah, it was 7-8 seconds.

www.savefrystreet.com
www.oaksclass.com
www.kaonevar.com

Took 13 seconds for me to load.. from UK.

Doesn't surprise me though.. I've just submitted a ticket after 3 time outs on my wordpress sites. Continued problem for the last few months that has just become unbearable.

Running on 'Atlantic'

I had a really prompt reply (30-45 minutes) saying that there were load peaks on my databse which were slowing things down. This has been resolved and is now being monitored.

Looks good so far.

~D

It is suggested to get the wp-cache plugin in order to reduce system and mysql load. This will also dramatically increase response time of the site.

No, my friend. This will only improve response times **ONCE THE PAGES EXIST IN THE CACHE**. Perhaps this explains why some people above were able to see the pages a little faster than the normal 10 seconds (because someone else had hit the site previously and the pages were coming from the cache.) If I clear the cache, or ensure that pages expire before hitting the page again then the performance remains woeful...