Running reports slow down website?

Hello Weslers,

It is not normal for your site to slow down during the report generating process. If those symptoms continue it could suggest one of a couple of problems are occurring with your site/server.

Basically what is happening during report generation is Google’s pagespeed servers are are loading up your site just like a normal visitor would, and then analyzing the data. The burden of analyzing the data is done on Google’s servers and then the results are sent back to the plugin so that they can be stored.

The plugin will continue to test each page of your site consecutively until all pages have been checked.

If this process slows down your website it would suggest that:

• Your web server is having a hard time dealing with the traffic from google and it responding slowly as a result. This would be more likely to be the case if you are on a cheap shared hosting environment.
• Or: Your site runs some heavy queries or other logic on every page load, which causes your server to respond slowly after many subsequent requests.

There are a number of solutions you can look into:

• If you are on poor performing hosting, you may want to consider upgrading to a better web host.
• If you think the performance issues may be due to heavy logic or slow queries you could focus on optimizing your sites code base.
• If you have not already implemented a caching solution (plugin based usually), that would help reduce the load on your server when pages are requested

In the meantime there is an option in the advanced configuration section of the options page called “Report Throttling Delay Time.”

This option will allow you to set a delay in between checking of pages to give your web server a chance to ‘catch up’.

The website does have a caching plugin installed and configured. I ran it 1st time about 4hrs ago and the site went from a repeat load time of 2secs to around 16-20secs. I talked to my hosting company and they said there is a spike on the server. I disabled the plugin left it for awhile enabled the plugin and it continued with the reports and again the site is running slower than normal.

What is your hosting company/package?

Do you believe you have any slow queries or other logic that may be putting a burden on your server? If you are unsure you may want to check out a service like https://newrelic.com to help you diagnose.

Have you tried throttling the reports?

We use Blacknight hosting here in Ireland. I dont think there is an slow queries as we are not running any big plugins like WooCommerce etc.

As we are on a shared hosting package we cannot install New Relic.

I am not able to make an changes to the settings as the reports are still running. How long should reporting take.

We use Blacknight hosting here in Ireland.

I am not familiar with their hosting solution, but they definitely fit in the ‘cheap’ category of shared hosting. That doesn’t necessarily mean that the host couldn’t handle heavier traffic, but generally in hosting you do get what you pay for.

As we are on a shared hosting package we cannot install New Relic.

Understood.

I am not able to make an changes to the settings as the reports are still running. How long should reporting take.

That depends on how many pages you have it configured to check (you can see this in the options page), and how long it takes google to check each page.

You should also see a progress bar at the top of your page showing the current status of page reporting, once it gets to 100% all pages have been checked.

I just tested it again just running a re-check on a URL and it slows the site down a repeat view which might normally take 1.5 secs no goes out to 5secs or longer.

I have not seen that behavior on any other site, perhaps there is something conflicting with your site in particular. Are you able to disable other plugins and redo your test from above to see if the problem still occurs?

Are you able to identify any errors in your servers error log that might be related?