views:

245

answers:

5

Hi,

What tools are there out there for determining why a site takes so long to load pages?

I'm using a very simple theme that I changed to fit my needs, it's a brand new site with only two test posts and it takes a while to load.

I used YSlow for Firebug and it gives the site a Grade A (90) so that doesn't really help. Is there anything else out there that might help me figure out what's going on?

Link is http://www.sundancevideo.ca

Thanks,

Vian

+2  A: 

try using a profiler like xdebug, how to setup:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Testing_WordPress_Performance#Configuring_Xdebug_for_Profiling

according to your site, the page is taking a long time to generate and doing a fairly large # of queries:

<!-- 28 queries. 2.728 seconds. -->


<!-- Dynamic page generated in 1.553 seconds. -->
<!-- Cached page generated by WP-Super-Cache on 2010-01-12 16:23:03 -->

so.. was there a plugin that was recently added that may be doing a lot of db calls?

supercache will help a lot, requests won't need to run all those queries if the page is cached...

jspcal
Checking brought me the exact same results. `3.23` seconds of waiting for the server to respond according to Firebug's Net Panel. The page was generated in `2.459 seconds` according to the comment. (By the by, thanks for pointing that out jspcal, I didn't know that Wordpress would dump the generation time in the HTML by default.)
Sean Vieira
Hi,I'm not too experienced with this sort of thing. I'm using Dreamhost to host my sites, would this require them to have xdebug installed or can I install it?
Vian Esterhuizen
xdebug would need root privs, but you can try disabling certain plugins and see which one may be causing an issue. you could also log queries like so: http://www.bsdeluxe.com/2009/08/31/rails-like-sql-query-logging-in-wordpress/ with supercache on tho, having a slightly longer initial page gen time won't really be an issue
jspcal
xdebug is for linux only, what about windows servers?
crosenblum
A: 

There's a lot of things that could cause this:

  • Slow internet connection
  • Slow/overloaded shared server
  • Wordpress is not the best written code and is quite slow

You can try using a wordpress cache plugin to make things faster (it wont compile the page every time someone accesses the page).

Ian
+2  A: 

Your site has a lot of (relatively large) images, which are scaled to a very small size. I suggest you create thumbnails of the size you need.


Edit: I just reloaded the page, and it goes fairly faster now: most probably because all the images were now buffered.

The Guy Of Doom
+2  A: 

Reverse DNS shows 35 other sites on your shared server at dreamhost; if you're concerned with speed, shared hosting is an issue.

songdogtech
A: 

I saw a front page load time of 7.5 seconds (according to wp-super-cache).

I'd first look at the amount of content you're listing on the front page. Try reducing it down to just the first day's content at the top and see if the page speeds up. If that works then you need to look at optimizing the content pull on the front page. If those are each a WordPress loop then you're going through a lot of high load routines. You might look at using filters on each of those WP Queries to only pull the small amount of data that you need to display the page.

Gipetto