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[Talmon]

Hey there,

We are in the proces of redesigning our X website. We chose to switch hosts in the process and start from scratch.
We are however experiencing very long ‘wait’ times on the loading of the site. At the moment the wait times are around 3.5 seconds.

Our current build is located at http://www.storymaildev.nl

We have tested several cases:
We installed a fresh wp installation on a subdomain = 0.5s wait time
We tested uploading a seperate HTML file (bypassing WP and X) = 0.4s wait time
Fresh X on subdomain = 1s wait
current website with X = 3.5 sec wait

We contacted the host and they fail to get any proper info from their tests. Everything appears to work in order.
We have disabled all plugins at the moment and still need to configure speed optimizing plugins like caching and minifying, but I assumed they do not affect the ‘wait’ time. (I may be completely wrong here)

Is there anything i’m missing concerning the wait time? The rest of the site is quite fast as it is, but I’d love to cut down that wait time, that is introduced when activating X and increases in time when filling the page.

Thanks!

[Jack]

Hi there,

Thanks for writing in!

I’ve taken a look at the site and have done some tests including a test on WebPageTest and checking the TTFB (time to first byte) and it’s a huge 3.7 seconds, you can see the full report here http://www.webpagetest.org/result/160412_GF_ZA4/

That will be one of the main reasons for the slow loading and will be a hosting related issue, possibly a misconfigured server.

What did the host say about the slow wait time?

Thank you!

[Talmon]

That’s indeed the problem.

The host ran some tests and said there was nothing wrong on their end. They said it would probably be theme or plugin related. We started with disabeling all plugins, but sadly no result.

Then we started testing with different themes/fresh installs of WP. The results are posted in the previous post.
The long wait time appears to be linked to X, but I dont know how.

The only thing im sure of is that if we use a different theme or otherwise bypass the X-theme the wait time is reduced to acceptable levels (0.5s or less).

I hope you may know a solution to this kind of weird problem.

Thanks

[Jack]

Hi there Talmon,

Thanks for writing back!

Do you happen to have a link to a site I could test with where X isn’t used on the same server? As TTFB, is the time to get the first byte from the server and should be entirely server related, as until the first byte is received the rest of the content hasn’t started to load, which should mean that any application, theme or plugin being used shouldn’t effect that initial TTFB time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_To_First_Byte

I’d love to take a closer look at this for you and a link to another site on the same server would be extremely helpful. 🙂

Thank you!

[Talmon]

Hey,

thanks for getting back to me.
I sure have some links. Storymaildev.nl is running several plugins now, and is quite unworkably slow at the moment. Still running several test.

test.storymaildev.nl is running X without content and has an average wait time of 1.5s for us.
test2.storymaildev.nl is running empty WP with a standard theme and has an average wait time of 0.5s for us, which is what we hope to be at with X.

All domains/subdomains are running on the same host/server.

Any insight on what could be causing this would be more than welcome! Thanks for looking into this.

Cheers!

[JvP]

Hi,

Who are you hosting your site with?

[Nico]

Hi @talmon,

Would you mind sharing us your admin credentials so we could check your setup closer.

Don’t forget to set it as private reply.

Meanwhile, please check this link to increase the speed of your setup. https://community.theme.co/kb/performance/

Let us know how it goes.

Thanks.

[Talmon]

Hey guys,
Im hosting the site with transip. I’ve had a bit more contact with them but the answer stays the same.
In addition, subdomain test (where X is running empty) has it’s wait time increased to almost 5 seconds!

The most interesting part however, is that when we disable the cornerstone plugin, the wait time dissapears!!

So, it’s 99% sure connected to cornerstone in some way.

Ill post the login seperately.

Thanks again for looking into this.

update I have to nuance the cornerstone statement a bit. I thought we found the error, but it appears the influence of cornerstone on the wait time is not quite as heavy as the first tests indicated. Disabeling cornerstone does however shorten the wait time.

[Talmon]

This reply has been marked as private.

[Talmon]

Update:After a whole day of extra testing it turns out that the problem is CPU load. Apparently the X theme needs quite a bit more CPU power from the server than what our host thinks is normal. If the site runs on a VPS through the same host with dedicated CPU the site is lightning fast.

The hosts does not provide a solution for the moment. Shared hosting with them is therefore out of the question. We will be switching to VPS hosting today and, if all goes right, we should be problem free after the migration.

I’m sorry to bother you with this thread as the problem is after all located at our host.

The only thing I still wonder about: Is X really that heavy on CPU load? Is this severely more than simple WP themes or is the host just limiting the cpu usage too much?

[Jack]

Hi there Talmon,

Thanks for the additional information, the X theme isn’t heavy on CPU load, we have members running it on shared hosting without issues and also dedicated servers and everything in between, would it be possible to get the CPU usage graph from a X powered site on your host and a non X powered site? You definitely shouldn’t need a VPS just to run X.

It sounds possible with high CPU usage, that there may even be a sql error somewhere, whereby a process is staying open and running causing it to slow down. Do you have access to mysql slow query logs?

Thanks!

[Author]

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