X Theme performance issues

Support
#1

Hi Guys,

First of all I would like to tell you that I love X theme with all its functionalities and I would like to use it in all my projects . I have few websites using X theme and last year I’ve planned to migrate a more important website to X. Unfortunately, the performance of X is not as good as the flexibility of your theme. As I couldn’t optimize enough the migrated website in January this year I took a brake until this month when I decided to try using a dedicated server on AWS. As I had the opportunity to run some performance monitoring tools, I decided to use New Relic as the monitoring solution and start testing both versions of my website (X theme and 3clicks theme) with Blazemeter.
To compare both themes as accurate as possible, I have both versions of the site using same version of Wordpress with same plugins installed and activated and same configurations for all plugins, including Autoptimize and W3 Total Cache.
After running the Blazemeter tests on both website versions, I see a huge difference in terms of performance.

As you could see from the screenshots attached dev.artenediana.com which is using X theme has a throughput of 1.82 Hits/s when www.artenediana.com has 16.82 Hits/s where the response time is 130 ms compared with X theme where we have a 30 s response time (of course for the same load of 50 concurrent users/visitors).

P.S: There are no errors in any log (nginx, php, mysql, etc.) when running both tests. Prom what I see is a general performance problem of the theme.
P.S.2: My environment: Ubuntu 16.04, PHP 7.1.8, nginx 1.13.4, MariaDB 10.1.26, Wordpress 4.8.1, X Pro v1.1.1

Thank you,
Ionut

#2

As you could see in the New Relic report, when running the test on dev.artenediana.com the CPU used is 100% when with the 3clicks theme is maximum 20%.

#3

I’m attaching also two screenshots for each website version test from NewRelic APM agent
for www.artenediana.com using 3clicks theme:

#4

and for dev.artenediana.com using X:

#5

Having the fact that the PageSpeed and YSlow score are even better on dev.artenediana.com compared with the 3clicks theme (used for www.artenediana.com) on my GTmetrix tests, as you could see on the attached screenshots, can you tell me if there are other optimization steps I could follow to have a proper response time for my website users?

P.S: There are no errors in any log (nginx, php, mysql, etc.) when running both tests. Prom what I see is a general performance problem of the theme.
P.S.2: My environment: Ubuntu 16.04, PHP 7.1.8, nginx 1.13.4, MariaDB 10.1.26, Wordpress 4.8.1, X Pro v1.1.1

Thank you,
Ionut

1 Like
#6

Hi There,

Upon checking your websites both sites performance are quite similar.

If you need to improve your performance even more you need to consult with a specialist.

Thank you

#7

Hi,

If you compare one visitor response time yes. But having in mind that it’s possible to have more users at a time :slight_smile: as seen on my BlazeMeter tests, where the PHP consumes 100% CPU, I’m afraid that is not enough to use Pingdom or other online tools.
Regarding the “improve performance even more”, is about the theme behaviour and server resource consumption on an average load of my website. It’s not about doing more on speed test, but more on the theme behaviour under load. I presume a specialist can look at the theme code and see where is the bottleneck :slight_smile:

Thank you,
Ionut

#8

Hi Ionut (@artio01),

Thanks for reaching out, I’ve had a look over the reports and in my own opinion I’d say there’s a core underlying issue with the server configuration with regards to how it’s setup to handle concurrent visits.

We have multiple customers using X and Pro on extremely busy websites including Government customers with thousands of concurrent visits with no noticeable slow-down in response or otherwise.

We’re constantly working on improving X and Pro and performance is always at the front of our minds. In your case, I’d recommend hiring an experienced sysadmin for a few hours to go over the server and check everything is ok, as there certainly shouldn’t be a bottleneck caused by the theme.

Thanks!