Forgot to mention. I tried to install the WP-DBmanager plugin, but I received the “white screen of death.”
Alrighty, installed WP-DBmanager and didn’t get the WSOD. I had to deactivate my other plugins and install WP-DBManager and then re-activated the other plugins, but still the site is slightly laggy at the beginning of any click.
Just a quick look at your site. I guess it\’s slower than other bp sites I\’ve seen. Speed depends on a lot of factors. The plugins you are using can slow you down if they do a lot of db queries. The host you use is also a major determining factor as well as the type of hosting. DV is usually faster than shared hosting.
bp takes advantage of the standard wp object cache now. I’ve heard of significant performance improvements. Use the latest trunk to take advantage of this. See below on how to turn it on.
https://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/WP_Cache
Personally i think it is your shared host; WPMU+BP needs pretty healthy servers to run optimally. I’m quite obsest with speed and testing. The WPMU+BP sites need at leats 512MB ram and CPU resources so any servers with avg load >3 it will just die. I’d say on shared hosting the HDD is being battered and trying to run BP MySQL queries on a shared host for it will run out of memory and start using the already busy HDD to store temp tables and data. Even using Super Cache you are reading and writing from an overworked HDD.
I’m not saying it is your shared host but i think its likely.
But i would still test it. Move your site to one side. Install the latest stable WPMU + BP and see what happens. If its still sluggish on those then its your host.
In my experience you need at least 512Mb free RAM, CPU load averages <3, good HDD health, basic apache (unnecessary modules removed), Super Cache, WP_Cache and e-Accelerator or x-cache if you can compile it into apache.
I tried to get nginx setup as a reserve proxy but had issues, that would be the ultimate.
Also try using the object caching support:
Improving Performance
WordPress MU itself is not designed to run on a shared server, so you should really avoid that if you can.
Thanks for the advice, I will go ahead and get a dedicated server hosting plan.
