Activating many plugins DRASTICALLY slows the plugins page rendering.

  • I am working on a pre-prod version of a new e-commerce site using woo. I have several plugins that I need for this project and yesterday ran into a snag. I installed a support plugin, Google analytics plugin, and an affiliate program plugin, all of which have several small add-on premiums that are loaded in as additional plugins. The additional plugins are very small, adding one feature.

    The issue I’m having is that before adding these new plugins I was rendering the plugins page in 500ms. I could also disable or enable plugins in the same amount of time. After activating the new plugins the time for both of these operations shot up to almost 10 seconds per action. This doesn’t slow down the rest of the site quite so much, yet it does still have an impact. If I disable the three sets of new plugins that I’ve recently installed I’m right back to sub 1 second for all operations.

    The site is running on a VPS at Vultr with 2 procs and 4 gigs of RAM. I don’t see any resource contention and the full database query time for the plugins page is about 50ms, so it doesn’t appear to be a database issue. This is presently the only site on the server, however, I do have Plesk setup as the hosting manager.

    So far I’ve upped the RAM for PHP, eliminated Apache in favor of NGINX, updated to the latest PHP, added a Redis object cache running in docker on the same box, nothing I’ve done thus far seems to remedy this.

    For those of you who are more intimate with how the plugin system works does anyone have any idea as to why I’m encountering this break-point for plugin management? I’d figure that if there were no resource issues that it shouldn’t have any issues with as many plugins as I’d like to install, particularly because I’m the only user on the site at this point.

    Any assistance would be appreciated as I’m banging my head against the wall as to how to resolve this issue.

    Thanks,

    Keith

Viewing 8 replies - 1 through 8 (of 8 total)

  • Sounds to me like you’re using a subpar VPS provider or the VPS is misconfigured. Either way, I make sure that you actually need reach and every plugin you’re using.

    I can’t tell you how many times I’ve helped a site owner with speed improvements on their website and the first thing I did was tell them to remove at least five plugins because they said they “didn’t need” or “weren’t really using” them.

    There’s also usually a few overlapping plugins in these situations that user similar functionality. When two plugins are implementing the same functionality that can slow down a site significantly… Specifically if you’re talking about caching plugins. Never use more than one caching plugin and personally I’d advise against using a caching plugin if your using a CDN such as cloudflare.

    • This reply was modified 5 years, 7 months ago by t-p.
    Thread Starter sirebral

    (@sirebral)

    Thanks for the response. The VPS provider is one of the top rated and it’s all they do, not something like a GoDaddy. They are a cloud infrastructure provider. The “hardware” doesn’t appear to having any issues and all of the Linux counters look good.

    Per the plugins I don’t have any that I’m not using and I don’t have any overlapping. I also don’t have any caching enabled beyond the object cache in Redis, yet disabling that makes no appreciable difference for this issue. I am also already running through Cloudflare.

    I’m perplexed. My professional background is server engineering and all appears good, yet I’m not incredibly versed in WordPress and Woo. Any other ideas would be appreciated.

    Thread Starter sirebral

    (@sirebral)

    Side note, I do not have Cloudflare enabled beyond DNS at this point as I’m still in pre prod. Performance tuning will come down the road. This issue is however a blocker as it’s a severe degradation without any load.

    Since it is not your server I would suggest paying close attention to this part of my original post

    There’s also usually a few overlapping plugins in these situations that user similar functionality. When two plugins are implementing the same functionality that can slow down a site significantly…

    Beyond that I can not make further suggestions without a link to your site and/or a list of the activated plugins. Please share screenshots of the plugin section of wp-admin using imgur.com.

    • This reply was modified 5 years, 7 months ago by t-p.
    Thread Starter sirebral

    (@sirebral)

    So… Here’s what I’m doing. I’ve installed new relic and I have much clearer view of what’s going on. It seems that some of the plugins are doing call home check-ins that are taking up to a second each. Without new relic I’m not sure how I would have found this out. Now it’s time to work with the devs to see why they are responding so slow. Thanks for the feedback regardless.

    Those call home check-ins are required to call for updates usually… and if you’re hooking the site up to any analytics software surely those calls are going to be required too for accurate analytics.

    New relic is definitely a handy tool but I’d be surprised if you weren’t using plugins have overlapping functionality and that wasn’t playing a role in the slowness you’re experiencing. Also, the higher number of plugins you are actively using the higher your chances are of having speed issues.

    • This reply was modified 5 years, 7 months ago by t-p.
    Thread Starter sirebral

    (@sirebral)

    I agree, and I’m ok with call backs, yet those need to be performing within reasonable bounds and non blocking if at all possible. Close to 1 second round trip for a blocking API call is going to be a non-starter for most applications.

    Okay, I just wanted to be sure you understood why the call backs were occurring. Many end users do not understand that those call backs are required to keep the code secure and updated.

    • This reply was modified 5 years, 7 months ago by t-p.
Viewing 8 replies - 1 through 8 (of 8 total)
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