Wordpress site extremely slow

Question

I have a wordpress blog that is having serious performance issues (like 10s to load each page). I installed WP Super Cache to try to solve the problem, but the first time a user visits the page after the cache expired againg it takes 10s to load. After it is cached, the site speed is normal.

So to try to fix this, I configured the preload mode to run every 30 mins but something is not working, because once the cache expires the first user has to wait 10s for each page...

I configured the cache to last 1 hour (1800s) and the preload to run every 30 mins, this way there should always be a cached version of the page that the users are requesting... but no :(

I would REALLY appreciate a help with this as I dont know what else to do.

Thanks in advance! Juan

Answer 1

Sometimes plugins can be poorly written and suck resources. Disable every plugin and see if the site runs okay. Then start re-enabling plugins until you find the source of the problem; you should then get rid of the offending plugin and find a replacement.

Answer 2

Install FireBug and use the "Net" tab to see what is taking long to load. It can be anything.. scripts, external scripts, images from external sites, DB connection etc etc.

I dentify the issue then it will be easy for you to solve.

Answer 3

If caching fixes the problem, then your likely culprit is poorly written code (lots of error suppression etc.)

An alternative issue is the server the code is hosted on (not as likely, but a possibility). If the server is having issues, or is running out of memory, it may respond slower in delivering content.

Answer 4

Do what the other say:

Then, also consider adding in multistage caching at different rates. Cache DB at one rate, Cache large page bits at another rate. Cache the whole page at another. That way no person loads it all in one shot. In theory.

Answer 5

The behaviour explained is completely normal. Cache Misses will be slow. This is expected. Set a cache without and expiry if you want it to hit the cache 100% of the time ( this is far from recommended)

Use an opcode cache if you can. such as APC.