Could you be running AO with “aggregate inline JS” (or inline CSS)? If that inline JS would change regularly, this will cause cache misses, requiring AO to build new autoptimized JS-files, indeed resulting in a slowdown. This would typically also lead to your cache-size growing fast.
If so, either disable “aggregate inline JS” or try to identify the culprit inline JS, excluding it from optimization.
let me know if this helps, if not I’ll be happy to hunt down the root cause with you 🙂
have a nice weekend,
frank
Hi Frank,
Awesome response time, thank you.
I am not aggregating JS, disabling it is the first step I took to try to find the root of the issue.
My email is miket@implicitsuccess.com, feel free to contact me at your earliest convenience.
Thank you!
Mike
OK, next step; can you check the speed (slowness) with either JS or CSS optimization disabled?
I apologize for the late reply. The website has a lot of plugins. I am using CloudFlare & MaxCDN. Today, when I tried Autooptimize with the CSS and HTML options checked(JS unchecked) it broke my site and maxed out the resources on a InMotion server to the point where I had to manually delete the plugin from the server. I’ve had various results with other caching plugins (they didn’t break the site), but Autoptimize was one of my favorites, I even paid for Critical CSS. I am not against paying for a decent solution, but it is hard finding something that works with this website’s configuration.
Like I said the site has a lot of plugins installed, so Autoptimize might conflict with them.
Combining and minifying JS is what gives me most trouble. I guess I’ll look for a plugin that gives me decent results and use CloudFlare’s Rocket loader after I figure out what scripts to exclude(it gives me awesome performance, but breaks couple of things).
Today, when I tried Autooptimize with the CSS and HTML options checked(JS unchecked) it broke my site and maxed out the resources on a InMotion server
That’s likely PCRE (perl compatible regular expressions) crashing PHP, probably due to the the amount of CSS OR due to something … funky in the CSS. As per the FAQ;
In some rare cases the CSS minification component currently used by Autoptimize crashes due to a lack of resources (see detailed technical explanation here). You can in that case either disable CSS optimization, try to exclude specific CSS from being aggregated or activate the legacy minifiers which don’t have that problem. The latter can be accomplished by adding this to your wp-config.php:
define("AUTOPTIMIZE_LEGACY_MINIFIERS","true");
The “legacy minifiers” will remain in Autoptimize “for ever” and changes to wp-config.php are not affected by core-, theme- or plugin-upgrades so you should be good to go.
So give those legacy minifiers a try?
Combining and minifying JS is what gives me most trouble
Be sure to use the “safe defaults”; don’t force JS in head, don’t aggregate inline JS and exclude js/jquery/jquery.js and if that doesn’t work look for JS errors on your browser console and copy/paste them here.
we’ll get there, eventually 😉
frank