Backend slow, tried disabling everything

Check wp-content/mu-plugins to see if you migrated anything from GD.

Make sure your database is optimized and that you’re giving MySQL/Maria enough memory to do its thing. This may help: https://github.com/major/MySQLTuner-perl

My php.ini is set to 512MB for memory_limit, completely overkill for what I am doing and how little traffic I get. There was nothing located in the drop-in section that wasn’t related to W3TC (Which I also cleared, just in case).

If you migrated the WP installation intact from GoDaddy WordPress hosting, then make sure to delete the wp-content/db.php file that GoDaddy adds.

I suggest removing mod_pagespeed as it usually does more harm than good. The same can be said for W3TC…have you tried deactivating it to see if things get better?

You definitely want PHP 7.1 and Zend Opcache. (Stay away from PHP 7.2 until the devs fix the OPcache bugs that have plagued the 7.2 branch since day one.) I’d also suggest using PHP-FPM with Apache/mpm_event.

And I agree that the MySQL configuration should be checked. The default configuration is terrible for pretty much any site! You should also stay away from MySQL 5.7+ and MariaDB 10.2+ because both require crazy/stupid amounts of resources compared to their predecessors. WordPress will run best with the MariaDB 5.5 branch, but you will need the MariaDB 10.1 branch if you were previously using MariaDB 10.1+ or MySQL 5.6+. (That’s due to WordPress creating a backward-incompatible DB schema with those versions.)

Currently using CentOS with mariaDB 10.1 and PHP 7.1 with FPM enabled. And yes, as mentioned before I have tried disabling both W3TC and mod_pagespeed. I have been extraordinarily careful with mod_pagespeed by restricting it to specific configurations for each site. Some don’t play well with MPS, so instead I just use MPS in IPRO mode so I don’t need to worry about minification.

I usually use W3TC with a copy/paste configuration that’s extremely general if the client doesn’t have the finances for me to dive in deep with optimization. I only really go deep into haggling with MPS if I have either extra time on my hands, if they pay for extra optimization, orif the client complains that their website isn’t achieving that ridiculous 100% PageSpeed score.

EDIT: Typo fix and MariaDB version number

• This reply was modified 6 years, 6 months ago by dylanlee98.

Is Apache set up to use mpm_event? PHP-FPM is slower with mpm_worker and much slower with mpm_prefork.

mod_pagespeed is hard on a server even if most of its features aren’t used, and it’s borderline useless on the WP backend since most everything it offers is done internally by WordPress. That’s why I suggested removing (not disabling) it.

One thing you can try is to use SSH to run the top command, then loading a slow page and watching the top display to see which resources are being used. You can also install a simple plugin that monitors resource usage. I’m clearly biased which one I’d choose since I’m the author; there are several in the plugin repository.

All of this is assuming the issue is server-based. Have you verified that this is the case?