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lhammond
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November 21, 2013 at 7:53 am
Our site is unbearably slow even without very many users hitting it, and the hosting provider is throttling our access because the site is taking up too much of the CPU. I have called hostmonster to see what they have to say, and they say that the server is running fine and we need to performance tune our site. When I run a top command in SSH it appears that every request to the site is spawning a new PHP process, which I imagine could be part of the problem, so I’m calling hostmonster back to see if they can configure that differently.
So what can I do to get better responsiveness on this?
1. Do you know anything about what makes extra PHP processes be spawned? Is there anything I can do in the code to help with that?
2. Is EE coded so that connections to the database are pooled and cleaned up well already because it’s using the wpdb API? I am using a customized version of espresso_table.php for our main class listing page… could I have inadvertently added something there that would have caused the dB calls to be ineffecient?
3. Is there a way to cache the event list pages? Should I use a WP Super Cache plugin, or perhaps some other caching tool?
Any other ideas would be much appreciated. We just opened registration today and people can hardly even sign up for events it is so bad!!
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Sidney Harrell
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November 21, 2013 at 11:05 am
1 – That’s more of a php – apache configuration issue. I would imagine that each request would create a new php thread, but that as soon as the request is served, that it would close that thread.
2 – Unless you put in direct php calls to the DB in your customizations, everything should be running through wpdb, which is fairly efficient.
3 – Caching is great for pages that are fairly static, where the html should be the same from visitor to visitor and static over time. Just make sure when choosing a chaching plugin to choose one that will allow you to exclude pages from caching. Make sure the four main EE pages, listed under general settings -> page settings are not cached. But if you are using another page with a shortcode for your event listings such as the table, that is fairly static, then that should be fine being cached.
On a side note, I would recommend staying away from shared hosting services, and going with a VPS at a minimum. Where shared hosting can limit you to 128MB, or even sometimes 64MB, a VPS at $30 a month gives you a minimum of 512MB and can expand up to 2GB depending on physical server load. Plus more CPU and MySql running locally in your server, etc.
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lhammond
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November 21, 2013 at 1:49 pm
All of my customizations either tweaked existing queries, or in a few places I had to add a query, but I followed the same coding example, using wpdb, so I would think that would be fine. I know my theme is inefficient, but I wouldn’t think it’s so inefficient that my server would get throttled when 50 people are visiting the site. I’m looking into that now.
So is it possible to run EE in a shared hosting environment, or is it just not compatible, no matter what you do with it caching-wise?
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lhammond
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November 21, 2013 at 2:34 pm
Also, do you have a caching plugin that you recommend which allows for certain pages to not be cached?
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Josh
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November 21, 2013 at 3:26 pm
Lots of folks use shared hosting to run Event Espresso, but the amount of traffic on the site may be less in those use cases.
Both W3 Total Cache and WP Super cache have the “do not cache these pages option”. I like WP Super Cache a bit more because it’s easier to set up/doesn’t have as many nag screens.
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