@jf_trumpet Where are you hosted? BP can be sluggish on shared hosting plans.
Improving Performance
Rackspace. I’m certain it’s not a shared hosting plan.
Thanks for the link. I’ll check it out.
@jf_trumpet
Unless the hosting company explicitly told you that it was a dedicated server then most likely it is shared server or VPS! Ultimately a dedicated server is most ideal for BP but can be expensive! Depending on the amount of users accessing the site in a given period a VPS may serve you well.
@bphelp What if this site is still in development and not released to the public? Should BP be causing slowness of the site without any users? I have been helping investigate why this install is so slow and the only thing that I can figure out is that BP is resource intensive.
@micasuh
I will not argue that. A server that works well under a standard WP installation may slow drastically when BP comes into play. It definitely needs more resources than a standard WP installation.
@bphelp I looked through the BP improving performance page and did not see any mention of what you said. Why aren’t VPS/Dedicated servers more highly mentioned on this page?
Do sites which use BP almost always have a dedicated server or VPS? I’m new to the BP world so all this information is good to learn.
@micasuh
I just know from experience that I had two BP sites running on a shared server and both ranked fairly high on google at one point. The host locked down both of them and I could no longer access them because they said it consumed more than 20% of the shared servers CPU resources. They told me I would need to upgrade to a VPS minimum but I should consider a dedicated server. Both sites lasted about a year before they shut them down. I did a lot of custom work to both of those sites. Luckily I was smart enough to back them both up every week so I still have them and the custom work as well as the database. I could migrate these whenever I want but I am so busy doing custom work for other people that my own sites is not as much of a priority to me anymore. You can try out a shared server if you choose but take my advise and always back it up in case this happens to you!
@jf_trumpet what exactly is running slow? If the site is accessible you can run it through the Pingdom speed check at http://tools.pingdom.com to see what resource is loading slowly.
WordPress is very zippy as it arrives out of the box – try deactivating BuddyPress to see if there is any improvement in load speed. That way you’ll know if it is in fact BP that’s the problem.
The best way to tackle the problem is to narrow it down.
@henrywright-1 I have deactivated all plugins on the site and as you said it’s zippy. When I activated just one plugin, BP, it went from zippy to slow. What should take only three or four seconds to load suddenly took 10 or more.
@micasuh try running it through Pingdom to see which resource is loading slow…
@henrywright-1 The site is not released to the public yet and is behind a Maintenance Mode plugin until we decide to release it. I have done a Network measurement using dev tools previously and it hangs on the initial load for about 20 seconds. Once it finally connects, everything else is relatively quick.
If you want, I can post a pic of the waterfall as a screenshot on here.
@micasuh BP shouldn’t add 20 seconds to the loading time so there is obviously an issue to be resolved somewhere.
Considering WP is zippy for you then that rules our your host being slow.
I’d try these steps:
1. Deactivate all plugins aside from BP (as you have already done)
2. Activate either bp-default or the Twenty Thirteen theme if you’re using theme compat
Does the problem still happen?
@henrywright-1 This isn’t just a problem with the theme. It’s also a problem with the Dashboard, too. Everything about the site is loading slow when BP is active.
The strange thing is that I have another plain instance of WP running with BP installed on another entirely different shared hosting server and it’s just fine. No speed issues.
EDIT: We got it switched to the default BP theme and it dramatically sped up rendering time from 20 down to 5. Crazy. The source code looks very similar, strangely.
Glad to see you’ve narrowed it down to the theme. It could well have been your theme loading too many resources or perhaps loading slow resources. What theme were you using?
I am looking to hire a developer (project only) to help me with my site. I posted on the wordpress jobs link, but I’m needing somebody that is more familiar with buddypress and creating dynamic lists within a groups page, to be specific.
Is there a place I can post this to let the BP experts (Not just WP) know?
Thank you,
We are still working on this issue and is one of the last hurdles to going live. The theme may not be as much of an issue as previously thought.
One of my developers did a gradual install of all fresh components and tested it along the way on a different host:
WP: Fresh install
Buddypress: Fresh install
Razor theme: Fresh install and default settings
Everything was as fresh and default as I could make it.
just WP: ~1 secs
WP + Razor: ~1.7 secs
WP + Razor + Buddypress: just over 4secs
WP + Razor + BP + 20k groups (homepage): Just under 8 secs
WP + Razor + BP + 20k groups (grouppage): 9-10 secs
So thats it, no other theme or plugins being used. Just the core WP Razor BP.
With my customizations and required plugins, the site loads around 30s per page.
My site has 20K+ groups, but there are no users. Would the number of groups affect the load times of the site?
We are not caching the site currently as this issue needs to be addressed prior to that option.
Thank you for your help.
did you check the very last link on the bp optimization page? its advice from your exact hosting company:
http://www.rackspace.com/blog/optimize-your-wordpress-site-with-w3-total-cache/
