[Closed] Performance issues

[Author]

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[Chris]

Hi,
I'm experiencing severe performance problems on one of our sites (hidden link) - pages taking 15s or more to load - and I'd appreciate some help with tracking down the cause.

I've been using the performance monitoring tool that our host (Kinsta) supplies, and that seem to be pointing to the ajax calls as the main bottleneck, and within those, it's showing that various calls to Toolset functions are taking large amounts of time. Here's an example of what I'm seeing.

Do you have any suggestions about what could be causing the slowness here, and what can be done about it? (I can provide access to the site admin if that is useful, and to our Kinsta account if it's useful to look in more detail at the monitoring results.)

Many thanks,

Chris

[Christian Cox]

Hi, some hosting plans and environments are configured in a way that has trouble handling multiple simultaneous AJAX requests, and when I check the browser inspector while the homepage is loading I can see 10 AJAX requests are triggered within about 0.5 seconds during the homepage load process (screenshot attached here). In many of these cases I've found that the best way to get immediate significant performance gains is to adjust the pagination settings in any View that uses AJAX pagination. Views' preloading of additional pages will initiate an AJAX request for each page being preloaded, all around the same time, rather than a single request to get all the preloaded pages. Disabling that preloading of pages will immediately drop the number of simultaneous AJAX requests triggered during the initial load sequence. In many of these cases the loss of preloaded pages in the Views' results does not cause a significant negative experience for the end User, especially compared to the impact of many AJAX requests at the same time.
Other options:
- I see 4 requests from Views and 6 requests from a plugin called flow-flow, which I understand is a social stream plugin for WordPress. I'm guessing that the server resources are being distributed between Views requests and this plugin's requests. If there is any way to delay this plugin's requests, or lower the total number of requests issued at once, like disabling or lowering preloaded content, it could help improve overall performance.
- You might see performance gains by bumping up your PHP version and/or MySQL version. Toolset runs well on PHP 7, but I would not update to PHP 8 yet. MySQL 5.6 or 5.7 should be sufficient.
- Simplify each View as much as possible by limiting the number of custom image sizes, nested loops, and additional queries like taxonomy term queries and related post queries.

I'll stand by for your updates, I'm curious to know if pagination settings improve overall performance here or not.