Long waiting to response time

Hi Hansjörg!

Unfortunately, it can’t be helped.

The problem is that WordPress’ AJAX API (that’s the admin-ajax.php call you see in the console) loads the entire WordPress environment (including themes and plugins) on each request, which as you can see can be quite slow. Since it’s a core issue, this is something us theme / plugin developers can’t fix.

Nope, that’s not normal at all. The API is slow, but not that much.

• What other plugins do you have installed?
• Are you on a shared hosting?
• Does your host support InnoDB tables?

What other plugins do you have installed?
Quite a lot

Well, this might be one of the problems.

As I said before, the AJAX API loads the entire WordPress environment every time a request is made. This means that if a plugin is just inserting a new record on the database, or reading data from it, WordPress still loads all of your plugins even if they’re not needed at that moment. The more plugins you have the longer the request will take to complete, which is why you should consider reviewing your plugins and keep only those you absolutely need.

Does your host support InnoDB tables?
To be honnest, I do not know at all what that is. Is this something good for page Speed?

It does make a noticeable difference, yes.

InnoDB is one of the many storage engines for MySQL. This particular engine is optimized for heavy write operations, which is great for plugins such as WPP or any other that constantly writes to the DB.

If your host does not support InnoDB, then chances are that your database tables are using MyISAM – a database engine optimized for heavy read operations (and little to none writes), which isn’t ideal in this case. When inserting a new record, MySQL locks the entire table to prevent other processes from reading / writing into it at the same time. What would happen if you have a lot of visitors checking your pages at a given time?

If that’s the case, then WPP’s tables must be using the InnoDB tables (you can confirm this via phpmyadmin) and so we can discard this as the source of the problem.

The next step now would be checking your plugins. Disable all of them -except for WPP-, open the console and visit one of your posts. Does the Ajax request still takes as much time to complete as before?

Log in into your hosting’s control panel. You should be able to access phpmyadmin from there. Once in it, you’ll find your site’s database, its tables and their info (including the storage engine).

Don’t worry about it 🙂 Let me know how it goes.