What Server Resources Involved in WP Admin Processes?

Review this tutorial andd see if it points in the right direction: https://kinsta.com/blog/admin-ajax-php/
https://www.wpbeginner.com/wordpress-performance-speed/

Hi, thanks for the quick reply! I think I’ve perused the guide at WPBeginner, or at least something similar to it, before. But I’ll dig more into the article about admin-ajax.php.

And just to clarify: the FRONT END performance of the sites on the different servers is pretty similar. When I test on GTMetrix, WebPageTest, Pingdom, PageSpeed Insights, etc., the results are typically very close (less than 0.5s difference at most, usually less). Sometimes Server A is faster on some metrics, too. Some of this may boil down to location – Server A is at a data center near Chicago I believe, while Server B is local in Los Angeles.

Most of the info on performance I find (like the article on WPBeginner) is focused on front end display, which completely makes sense. We try to follow a lot of these recommendations, including using W3 Total Cache on all sites, etc.

I’m just trying to narrow down why the exact same site, running same theme, plugins, etc, is so much drastically faster in the BACK END. So any performance hits the theme or plugin may be imposing would be exactly the same.

Thanks for any insight here!

The Xeon Gold CPU supports a much richer instruction set than the E3-1230 and has a significantly larger cache, but these alone would not explain the major difference you reported.

There are far too many unknowns here (network/disk hardware, MySQL/Apache configuration, etc) to offer an assessment — and besides, this site is for WordPress support, not server support. You should contact the hosting company.

There are far too many unknowns here (network/disk hardware, MySQL/Apache configuration, etc) to offer an assessment — and besides, this site is for WordPress support, not server support. You should contact the hosting company.

Yeah, I know it’s a challenging issue. I was mostly hoping to get some ideas of what specific resources WordPress taxes when doing something like software updates, where I’m seeing such a drastic difference.

If my hosting company is not super familiar with the inner workings of WordPress admin processes, they may not know where to start in debugging. I’m sure most performance requests are more general, or geared towards front-end display, which may be easier to measure.

I was trying to find something regarding what exactly happens during a WP update, for instance (e.g, how many files & how large need to be downloaded & overwrite what’s current, etc.), but not having any luck so far…

The WP update process goes like this:

1) download the update package
2) un-zip the update package
3) verify integrity of files to be replaced
4) replace files
5) clean up filesystem
6) update database

Going from WP4.5 to 5.9 is a major update. (2), (4), and (5) should not be issues unless your server is poorly configured. (1) could be a significant issue if a server has network issues. (3) could be a significant issue if PHP isn’t using the sodium extension. (6) will be a significant issue if MySQL is poorly configured.

One thing you could do to speed up updates is to add the following line to each site’s wp-config.php file before beginning the update process:

define('CORE_UPGRADE_SKIP_NEW_BUNDLED' , true);

This will stop the downloading/installing/updating of themes and plugins that have been bundled with WordPress from 4.5 to 5.9.

Thank you Dion, this is very helpful.

– Is there a way to determine roughly how large the update packages are, so we know how much network bandwidth & speed factor in?

– And does roughly 8 seconds to do all of those steps seem about inline with a modern, well configured server, or abnormally fast?

And updating WP is just the main test that seems to show the exaggerated difference in timing most clearly. Other admin processes feel similarly sluggish on Server A. And when testing updating about 10 various plugins at once, the difference is pretty stark as well – about 2-3 minutes for Server A, and about 20-30 seconds for Server B.

So seems like from this it could be: A) Network issues; B) PHP configuration issues (though both servers are pretty similarly configured); C) MySQL issues (we do have difference here of MariaDB vs. MySQL).