Monitoring Hosting Performance - performance

I've been building a site, running Wordpress 3.2.1 and noticed
the performance is sluggish in the front and back end.
I believe the problem is hosting specific.
The problem seems to be the connection loading the actual HTML
which is taking about 5.5 seconds. It appears to finish after
about 500ms, but does not stop loading for 3-4 more seconds.
Here is the development URL:
http://d1001488.u57.ukisp.com/dev/
Hosting:
Windows NT
PHP Version 5.2.10
There are a couple of jQuery select boxes that get
replaced and styled onload (in the footer), these take a
long time to get replaced after the page fully loads.
The hosts are claiming all is running properly. Is there
any thing I can try and tweak or monitor to see what
is going on? Or any suggestions?
Thanks.

For largely extrinsic causes, try YSlow. This will identify a number of things you can work on. It won't tell you anything about the internal behavior of your server, but it may help you narrow down what's going on.

The problem may be a specific plugin. Here's what I would recommend:
Try going through each plugin, deactivating it, and see if that makes your site load faster. Do this for each plugin, and if a deactivated plugin doesn't improve performance then just reactivate it and move to the next one.
Try temporarily activating the default Twenty Eleven theme. See if the default theme loads faster. If it does, then we can look at your custom theme.
These two things may help narrow down at least where the problem is coming from. Let me know how it goes!

Do you have CPanel access with your hosting account? If you do, look in the left side toolbar at the bottom you should see where it says server status (click to view) you will see various details about your server performance.

Related

Website running slow in IE with no specific reason why

We have a website that a few people are complaining about it running extremely slow. We're struggling to figure out why and to even recreate it. Most are mentioning that it's running slow in IE.
It's not limited to any specific section of the site, just the whole thing in general.
There's been several developers creating/adjusting the code so it's overly bloated but we can't see any specific reason why this should happen.
Can anyone see why?
We've also run a speed test:
I was running a profiling test with IE on your website and there is a call to:
http://www.playforce.co.uk/-ms-transform.htc
Which is giving error 404 not found and taking 1 second to complete (0.91 sec).
If is found all around your css under this line:
behavior:url(-ms-transform.htc);
Am no expert !! Am welcome to better suggestion and corrections of what i am about to say
You can try using a trial version of Borland Silk meter ..
They tend to measure the speed with which each element loads using various browsers and various geographical locations which are configurable by you.
Also , since only some of the user's are complaining about the speed being an issue you should also check the speed of their internet and their browser version and other addon etc of those users. Because sometimes the problem is not only with the server .
Try the above tool to confirm nothing is wrong in your server and then proceed to checking the client's browser and network.

IE takes too much time to load the page compared to Firefox

I have a page which displays around 1000 records.
The page gets loaded quite easily on firefox..around 2 seconds. But same on IE taking more that 10 seconds.
I checked performance tuning on server side, and modified the hibernate Criteria query returning this whole data. But issue is still there.
I also tried to remove almost all the plugins from IE thinking those could be the culprits. But no impact. :(
Trying to monitor the UI components on IE developer tool, but didnt find much details.
Any suggestions please. :)
Thanks in Advance :)
Performance issues like this will be down to rendering the UI. The server side processing won't vary from browser to browser, so it will be down to the way different browsers handle the drawing of the elements. Without seeing your page in action it is not easy to suggest anything to help improve your situation.
Guys Got the Culprit here... :) :)
After doing lot of RnD on Server side and Client side, I took a look at "Developer Tool" in IE.
You can find something like "Document Mode: Quirks". If you check the Wiki page for this Quirks mode, You can find a definition as "In computing, quirks mode refers to a technique used by some web browsers for the sake of maintaining backward compatibility with web pages designed for older browsers, instead of strictly complying with W3C and IETF standards in standards mode."
So this all becuase of checking for compatibility for all components on page. And hence the performance issue. :)
And When I changed this mode to IE 8 Standard. Things started working really well.
IE and its issues ...!!!! :D

How can I figure out why my Wordpress pages load so slowly?

Yet my site pages load very slowly. Usually there's a 2-3 second lag before the page renders, and I cannot figure out why.
My site is powered by Wordpress v3.4.2.
I'm on a dedicated virtual server with plenty of resources and
bandwidth.
There are no huge images loading.
My CSS files load before JS scripts.
I've spent a lot of time trying to optimize the site within the constraints of the platform (Wordpress + plugins, etc). I don't expect my site to be SUPER fast, but I need it to not be SO slow.
I'm using Chrome's developer tools to audit my site but the suggestions do not appear to explain the long load time (unused CSS rules, etc). When I look at the timeline, I see a 2.7x second load time initially but I can't figure out why. Can anyone help me get to the bottom of this?
My site is located here. The homepage has some extra scripts, so it may be more helpful to look at this page.
I found this superb guide which really helped me fight through the mire of optimising Apache for use with WordPress:
http://thethemefoundry.com/blog/optimize-apache-wordpress/
You said you have a virtual server so chances are it's currently set up to load EVERY module - you'll find a great speed boost here if you eliminate unnecessary modules. Keep a backup of your config file in case you screw it up.
Also - use the TOP command through SSH to see how much memory PHP is using. Probably a lot currently. This will all be improved through eliminating modules as per above link. You don't mention how much memory you have on your VPS but there's a good chance your performance issues are coming from memory thrashing which will be mitigated significantly by reducing how much memory each PHP instance consumes using the link above.
Also, it matters to find out where your performance issues are actually coming from – a great little plugin called WP Tuner helps me locate performance bottlenecks. The original plugin is incompatible but someone else has written an upgrade:
http://www.wwvalue.com/tuts/tut-wp/wordpress-profiler-tuner-revised.html
That will help you identify which specific parts of the page are taking the longest to load so you will immediately find your performance bottleneck.
In addition, a cool plugin called Debug Queries is useful for tracking down performance issues although the wordpress profiler above actually does track queries too.
Finally – I can’t recommend highly enough this WordPress.org discussion on performance, and specifically on W3 Total Cache vs Super Cache (both are excellent).
It’s a fantastic read for anyone looking for split-second response times:
http://wordpress.org/support/topic/wp-super-cache-vs-w3-total-cache
I use W3 total cache on one of my sites and WP Super Cache on another. Both are great. I used both so I could learn about both. I would say use WP Super cache plus all the other tools the guy at the link above recommends if you're looking for extreme performance, but if you're looking to get immediate performance W3 total cache is more comprehensive in its initial setup.
Hope that helps.
use caching plugin,
put JS files at the bottom,
try different webhost (DB server may be slow sometimes)
minify css and JS,
make fewer HTTP requests
make sure external services (like FB and others) are not slowing down (remove
them and see if it helps)
run Yslow or similar test
try to use typekit or google font instead of cufon
Have you tried http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-super-cache/ or a similar caching plugin?

WP7 - January tools update explodes my application. What'd I do?

I've Googled around a bit on this issue and haven't been able to come up with anyone else having an issue to this one, so a) I apologize if this is a known issue; and b) I'm thinking this proves that I must be doing something horrifically wrong, yeah? :-)
My application has a very rich landing page which is the first page that is shown after a new launch. It has a panorama control, a large background image (but much smaller than the 2000x2000 limit) and recurring and ongoing animations. Prior to updating my tools to the January refresh, this page ran relatively smoothly. After updating and running the app in the emulator, the background of this page is white (despite the fact that the emulator is on the "dark" theme), performance is quite poor (both in terms of swiping through the panorama and in terms of my recurring animations). When I run the same project on my device, all is well (since, quite obviously, my device's OS is not on the updated image).
Clearly I must be doing something grievously wrong to merit such a cataclysm, but I'm not sure what it might be. I've tried disabling bitmap caching in the places where I'm using it, removing third party tools I'm using such as Peter Torr's awesome tilt effect and his memory usage counter, and several other hail-Mary-style moves, and the problem remains. I also looked through the provided resources and change log to see if perhaps something related has changed, but I didn't see anything.
I'll try to provide example code later if it would be of any use to any would-be saviors out there, but the app is pretty complex and large in terms of lines of code and file size, so it might be a bit tricky. i just thought I'd toss this out there and see if anyone might happen to see it and think of an obvious solution.
Thanks so much in advance for your time and help.
P.S.: I cross-posted this question on the official WP7 dev forums. Sorry if that's against the rules - I'm not a regular SP-poster, as you can tell. If it's a problem, let me know and I can delete the other post.
I was ultimately able to resolve this by creating a brand new project using the updated tools and copying my code, assets, and relevant project settings into it. The app now runs flawlessly on the emulator (or, at least, the flaws in it are my flaws and not the emulator's :-)).
I believe I originally created the project on an earlier version of the SDK, so maybe I had some kind of invalid or incorrect project settings. If I get a moment later, I'll compare the project files to see if I can identify a setting or difference that explains the disparity.
Thanks to all who looked (and to Matt, who even responded :-)). I'll report back if I have any more information that might be of help.
UPDATE: Updating for anyone who might be having this issue as well - my resolution above was a false positive. Creating a new solution and copying stuff in does indeed work, but only until you save and close the new solution. Upon reopening, the problem recurs. Grrrr. I'll post back if I come up with anything else.

Drupal development: performance

as the single user / developer on a drupal website im experience serious performance problems. several issues occur:
usually i develop drupal on our company dev server but now im at a client's office. the IT guys installed a VM with WAMP on the server they usually use for .net development. on the first day of dev (installing drupal, required modules and configuring them) httpd.exe would max out the cpu and loading any page would take minutes. IT guys just scratch their heads.
i then just installed WAMP on the local machine they gave me: some 299,99 Win XP Dell piece of sh*t, nevertheless a P4 2.8Ghz 2GB Ram. the fan blows so loud the entire office is giving me dirty looks. Again httpd.exe maxes out. again, any page (esp admin ones) takes minutes to load
in firefox, the views UI is completely unworkable. alot of stuff is loaded with ajax and it again takes minutes to see the various html elements dynamically inserted in the UI to appear - try to imagine this.
Chrome seems to handle the JS a bit better but it still takes way too long to complete any kind of action.
the devel_themer module ads tons of markup to the page which leads to "Allowed memory size of X exhausted" errors (memory_limit = 128MB ).
now im at the themeing stage where i need to do a LOT of page refreshes. I NEED firebug which requires firefox which in its turn eats up CPU and RAM. What usually takes seconds now takes minutes and by the time whatever action is completed, i forgot what i was doing. im basically reading news stories in between every page reload.
now, i know drupal is resource intensive but that its impossible to develop on a typical Dell / Win XP machine is a bit much, no? at home i work on an iMac and everything runs silky smooth.
i cant imagine im the only guy with this problem since what im doing is basically drupal 101 (no custom modules so far ...). unless someone can offer a solution, im concluding that you basically can not develop a typical drupal site on a normal home desktop computer.
what gives?
So you have abandoned the VM,check you php.ini file for the memory limit, increase it and see if there is a performance boost. its usually set to a default of 16M.
HTH
I'd suggest you either make sure to spend some time actually tuning your XP system, because the default WAMP config is definitely suboptimal, or consider an alternative, like Zend Server community edition (ZCE). Although not completely free as in speech, it is free as in beer, and simply builds up on top of a better default config for Apache and MySQL.
Although less convenient than WAMP or ZCE since not bundled, a manual install of Apache 2.2 is also usually a good choice.
Also note that, that the way devel_themer works, it is constantly building files in your temp directory, meaning that unless that directory is cleaned regularly, files will accumulate and directory browses will become exceedingly slow. Only a cron.php run will cause drupal to clean those files, for an up-to-date version of devel. See my patch adding this cleanup at http://drupal.org/node/303443
Finally, you mention Firebug, and you might be using the Drupal for Firebug module, which has known performance issues, apparently related to infinite recursion in some cases; although recent versions are supposed to fix this problem. See for instance http://drupal.org/node/303443
A couple things I've run into that could potentially help.
Unless you actually need it, turn off Locale. It causes a ton of extra queries (at least the last time I looked into it, this may have changed) so if you're not using it then don't put the unnecessary load on your DB.
Just like on a regular development machine, make sure MySQL is properly tuned and configured. This goes for any setup; local, development or production. 3/4 of the time the database is the bottleneck so start there.
If you've got the devel module installed and enabled it should have a query log you can tell it to output at the bottom of the page, this should help you with number 2.

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