I should add that I am on WordPress 3.2.1 and disabling plugins does not affect performance (well, you know, except the ones that actually HELP performance).
I also downloaded and properly installed the WordPress MU Domain Mapping plugin, but as I’m not using subdomains, this didn’t seem to be an issue. So maybe it’s not mapping that is the problem?
Domain Mapping plugin isn’t for subdomains, it’s for … y’know, domains 🙂 Like mapping alternate.com to use the subsite http://cchs.ua.edu/alternate 🙂
I’d be inclined to think it’s a server thing. Maybe toss a singlesite up there and see if it also runs slowly. If so, you may need to get into server optimization, with server-side caching.
Thanks, Ipstenu. I kind of figured that out myself as well.
I’ll put up a single site and see what happens, but I will go ahead and say that there are a ton of other WordPress sites on the University’s servers and they all seem to run great.
Are they on THIS server? No two servers are created equal 🙂
I’m not sure, to be honest.
Anyhow, I created a separate WordPress install at, you guessed it, cchs.ua.edu/alternate. It’s got the same issue. Takes a lot longer to load than, say, ua.edu which is also a WordPress site but one that has a lot of more content on it. It’s certainly faster than my main sites but I believe that’s only because it’s empty.
So where does that leave me? Does this sound like a server issue, then? What should I ask them to do if you think that might be it?
I should also say that I’ve got a regular ol’ HTML/PHP site (no CMS at all) that runs in a sub-directory just fine and doesn’t seem to be slow at all.
Yeah, I would tell the server guys: “I’ve noticed this server runs WordPress a lot slower than < other WP server >. Is there a problem with the database I’m using or the PHP install? Can we optimize anything to handle this better?”
After a little more testing, the stand-alone WordPress site doesn’t seem like it has this problem after all (or at least it’s much more minor). However, my htaccess file doesn’t seem right… could this be the problem?
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine on
#wordpress
RewriteBase /
#uploaded files
RewriteRule ^(.*/)?files/$ index.php [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !.*wp-content/plugins.*
RewriteRule ^([_0-9a-zA-Z-]+/)?files/(.+) wp-includes/ms-files.php?file=$2 [L]
# add a trailing slash to /wp-admin
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^.*/wp-admin$
RewriteRule ^(.+)$ $1/ [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -f [OR]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -d
RewriteRule . - [L]
RewriteRule ^([_0-9a-zA-Z-]+/)?(wp-.*) $2 [L]
RewriteRule ^([_0-9a-zA-Z-]+/)?(.*\.php)$ $2 [L]
RewriteRule . index.php [L]
</IfModule>
Options +Indexes
I also just remembered that when the designer made this site, he created it so that we could switch back to our old Drupal site because at the time we still had content that we needed to refer to. Maybe he set something up so that we could switch between, but in the meantime managed to make the site slow?
Just some thoughts…
.htaccess shouldn’t cause a significant slowdown. How much memory have you on this server?
No idea, unfortunately.
It’s not that it’s loading individual elements slowly, it’s that it takes a long time before the page starts loading at all. Once the loading begins, it’s very fast (especially after enabling Supercache and Minify). It’s that initial delay or stutter that’s the problem.
Edit:
One addition. I should say that define('WP_ALLOW_MULTISITE', true); is NOT in my wp-config and in fact actually breaks the sites when added. This seems like odd behavior.
Edit2: Okay, never mind it appears adding the above does not break the site, but it also doesn’t change anything either.
Okay, I’m beginning to suspect that this might actually be a plugin after all, will keep this updated.
That sounds likely. If it hangs before loading, is this only on the front end? The backend loads fast?
The backend is a bit slow as well, and it does the same thing. I’ve now gone through and deleted many unused plugins, but I’m not completely discounting that it could be one. In any case, after tweaking caching and minifying some more, I’ve been able to get load times down to pretty acceptable levels, I think.
I’ll keep this open for a bit more, though, as I plan to tackle this some more next week.
Caching and minifying won’t help the backend. I really think this is a weird server setup and it’s just not optimized for WP. Multisite needs no extra tweaks compared to Single WP.
I’ve done a bit more work, and I’ve gotten the front-end to what I consider acceptable levels. The backend still feels a little sluggish. I still think this might be a redirecting issue that that needs to be taken care of server-wise, as you mentioned Ipstenu, but I’ll leave this open for just a bit longer until I know for sure.
There was one issue with my multi-site configuration that I found the previous web developer had somehow missed. In wp-config.php, I was missing
define('MUTLISITE', true );
define('SUBDOMAIN_INSTALL', false );
The rest of the multisite code generated was there. I don’t know how much a difference that actually makes, but it SEEMS like it would probably be important. I’ve added it (though it doesn’t seem to have affected speed on either the backend or frontend, and all of my sites were already accessible).
Also noticed that Minify needs to be activated on each individual site, as network activation did not work for me (though, I guess it could have been because of the missing code from wp-config.php that made that happen).
I also deleted a lot of unused plugins and updated a bunch of them, too. Again, didn’t notice an immediate difference after doing this but everything is getting very close to the “acceptable speed” range for me.
I’ll continue to update this thread in case someone else has similar issues in the future.
