Beware!

  • I was using only custom CSS and thinking of using the Stats until I realized that it was substantially slowing down my blog.
    (Then I found out that I was not the only one: just search the web for WordPress Custom CSS slow. The only solution I found (from Jetpack authors) was to move the custom css into the theme which was no problem for me since I had already hacked my theme.)
    Then I deactivated Jetpack and deleted it successfully – I checked, no files left.
    Nevertheless, Jetpack’s items were still referenced in the headers of my pages. (I first noticed this in the pingdom waterfall.) There were three items: custom css, jetpack css and an item at s0.wp.com. The custom CSS was a 404 while jetpack css was 0 bytes; these two took a lot of time for my server to deliver. (Yes, I saved this waterfall on my comp.)
    After a few hours of searching the net for the reason, I suddenly found that these items disappeared from the headers and the waterfall.
    I looked at the waterfall, refreshed pages, looked into the headers, tested the page with pingdom again – and suddenly the three jetpack’s items were gone!
    I want to understand what is going on on my site and really do not like this kind of behavior behind my back!
    While searching for reasons of my trouble, I have found that many people had many troubles with Jetpack [ link redacted, please do not post links in reviews ]
    Enough for me to never use any of its wonderful features!

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
  • Plugin Author Jeremy Herve

    (@jeherve)

    Jetpack Mechanic ??

    Thanks for the feedback!

    I was using only custom CSS and thinking of using the Stats until I realized that it was substantially slowing down my blog.

    Since Jetpack’s Custom CSS module saves your CSS code in your database as a Custom Post Type, it needs to make a query to grab that code from your database. That query will indeed be slower than if you were to serve CSS from a static file, such as your theme stylesheet.

    That’s something we’re aware, and we plan on making some improvements on that aspect. You can follow our progress here:
    https://github.com/Automattic/jetpack/issues/1026

    Then I deactivated Jetpack and deleted it successfully – I checked, no files left. Nevertheless, Jetpack’s items were still referenced in the headers of my pages.
    […]
    I want to understand what is going on on my site and really do not like this kind of behavior behind my back!

    If you deactivate a plugin using the Plugins menu in your dashboard, its code doesn’t run on your site anymore. Jetpack (or any other plugin) consequently can’t add files to your site if you deactivate the plugin.

    If the files were still present when loading some pages on your site, it’s most likely because the page was cached, either by a caching plugin or by pingdom itself.

    I hope this clarifies things a bit.

    Hi byoussin,

    I am a newbie who started using Jetpack and some of its fine collection of features. I too felt that there was some depreciation in speed associated with certain features within the pack.

    I suppose it has to be generally accepted that if a feature requires access to additional resource, there will be some level of impact (putting a wing mirror on a car for example).

    This for me is balanced on cost against benefit.

    Anyway, I now use “Simple Custom CSS V3.2” by John Regan & Danny Van Kooten. It does the job quite adequately, and dsiplays no discernable speed deficit.

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
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