Backend of site is Slow with Slimstats Turned On

Hi Craig,

I would recommend the following:

– switch the tracker to client mode
– show the menu in the sidebar, not admin bar
– turn off tracking of admin pages

See if this helps.

Camu

Thanks for the quick reply.

I did the suggested tips up top, the only thing I had changed from default was tracking of admin pages, I have switched it back.

It still took 28 seconds to load my dashboard.

Craig,

If the Dashboard is the only page affected, you may want to turn off the feature that adds reports to that screen. Your server might not be powerful enough to handle the extra load required to crunch the data. How many records do you have in the Slimstat main table?

Camu

It’s the entire backend that’s slow. I have already turned off the windows showing in the “Dashboard”.

My server power isn’t an issue. I’ve asked my server guy for load information and full specs.

It would be interesting to see what is happening at a lower level. Slimstat does not perform any data manipulation other than on its own screens. On all the other admin pages, when tracking is off, the only thing it does is to add the side nav menu. Which should have very little impact on performance.

Keep us posted,
Camu

This is from my server admin:

Your current web server load average from the last 8 hours is 2.85. (16.00 would be your theoretical maximum at current spec). This translates to roughly 17.8% CPU use.
You’re on a 16 Core web server coming from dual Intel Xeon E5 V2 Processors with 16GB RAM for 1866MHz ECC RAM with Pure SSD RAID 10 Array on Web and DB servers and SAS RAID 10 Array with SSD Enhancement for your attachment server. Your CPU models on your servers are dual Intel Xeon E5 2690 V2 and dual Intel Xeon E5 2620 V2.

A NewRelic analysis of your server from the last 30 minutes, shows ‘wordpress.cloudapp.net’ is the most time consuming external service connected to your site, taking up 98.6% of the loading time. It has a very high call per minute count. Screenshot is attached of the analysis showing the 98% hold up. This is most likely due to server issues at wordpress.cloudapp.net. It seems to be very slow or not responding, which in turn will make your backend crawl. Until they resolve their issue, it will be slow in your backend.

To determine which plugin is causing this, I ran a full scan of the code of all your plugins and one plugin uses the URL mentioned above. The plugin called ‘wp-slimstat’ makes requests to that very same URL, wordpress.cloudapp.net:

Here is a copy of the plugin, filename, and line number where the request url is mentioned:

wp-slimstat/wp-slimstat.php:1507: $request_url = ‘https://wordpress.cloudapp.net/api/update/?&url=’ . urlencode( ‘https://’ . $_SERVER[ ‘HTTP_HOST’ ] . $_SERVER[ ‘REQUEST_URI’ ] ) . ‘&agent=’ . urlencode( $_SERVER[ ‘HTTP_USER_AGENT’ ] ) . ‘&v=’ . ( isset( $_GET[ ‘v’ ] ) ? $_GET[ ‘v’ ] : 11 ) . ‘&ip=’ . urlencode( $_SERVER[ ‘REMOTE_ADDR’ ] ) . ‘&p=2’;

I see. In this case, please go to Slimstat > Settings > Tracker, scroll all the way down, and set Enable UAN to “No”. I will look into this with our developer to figure out what the issue could be.

Thank you for the detailed explanation and for your time.

Best,
Camu

Done, I look forward to hearing more.

Thanks for the timely support.

Cheers,
Craig

Hi, is the admin faster now? We will include some code tweaks in the next update to avoid this kind of situation from happening again. Thank you.

Hey

No, that admin side is still very slow.

Really strange. Once you turn the UAN off, the code will not make that call anymore, so I wonder what the issue could be. Would it be possible for your sysadmin to take another look at NewRelic? We’ve already added the patch to our code, and we plan to release it in about a week or so.

Thank you for your time and for helping us troubleshoot the issue.

Camu

I’ll do that, hang tight.

Thanks,
Craig

Hi, any news from your sysadmin?

This is from my admin

I’m not exactly sure where the issues lies in their code, as the next transaction breakdown of NewRelic requires a $150/month upgrade for deeper analytics. All I can tell you is that it’s definitely WP-Slimstat. Once the plugin is deactivated, the Dashboard has no issues and is quite fast. As soon as I reactivated the slimstat plugin, everything slowed down to a crawl.

Hi,

I’m sorry about that. I am not sure what else could it be, at this point.

Camu