WordPress hanging Hostgator support can't find the solution

@cannobbio – that’s a thought I had because I have a reseller account through HostGator as well as a Plesk account where updates are manual. Now that you mention it, I am only experiencing the hangs on sites that have been updated recently.

This may or may not be a piece of the puzzle, but I am experiencing these same lag issues, specifically on Hostgator sites. I’ve put in a ticket but not gotten anywhere with their suggested solutions.

One day I happened to be debugging an issue in Safari and the usual hang ups were non-existent. I went back to chrome (my usual browser) and boom – the site started hanging again. Went back to Safari and it was fine. I’ve been going back and forth with both browsers now for about a month and Safar never hangs on me. Only Chrome.

We’ve got 3 Host Gator accounts and we are experiencing TERRIBLE (as in clients calling us from other locations) LAGS on these WP sites.

I’m in North Carolina.

We only have one WP site that has a lot of customization and gets a lot of traffic. The rest of them are pretty small, get a mild amount of traffic, running very minimal plugins (mostly a Picasa plugin, Simpler SEO, and a Captcha for forms). But it doesn’t seem to matter, the lag is still there. I’ve also had lag trying to login to a brand new, fresh install.

I contacted Host Gator and they sent me a link to an article about using a cache plugin and doing a few other things.

I’ve been having the exact same issue for a few weeks now with a Hostgator reseller server. I have several sites running WP v3.3.1 and they have become unusable. I might get 5-7 page loads normally but then it will hang for up to a minute or so doing something routine like updating a post. I’ve been on with support about 8 times so far with no help from them. I have tried no plugins, etc. and no luck. The only change I can identify is the upgrade to the latest version of WordPress — some sites I’m running have been unchanged other than that in over 2 years and have never had issues.
I have tried various browsers, it doesn’t solve anything. Might seem to for a few minutes but then the hangups start in the new browser. Seems like some kind of a memory leak issue from the symptoms but I can’t identify anything unusual there.
If anyone else has found anything that helps alleviate this please post.

Actually, I may have just figured it out. I tried changing the permalinks from Post Name (which I have on pretty much all the sites) to Numeric and it seems to be flying again. I’ll let you know if this proves to be anything.

I wondered about Permalinks yesterday – currently mine are set up with a date/month/postname format.

I’m willing to give it a try on a few sites as well to see if it helps. But, would the permalink have anything to do with even an initial login to the admin back end? Because as I went to login to a site to make this change… it is hanging at the login.

Does anyone notice if they are having lag on one of their WP sites, have you tried to login to another WP site on your same hosting account?

I got curious yesterday when I was having lag and visited a few of our static sites on our HG account and didn’t have any problems. But I did not think to try another WP site to see if the lag affected that site as well.

Knock on wood, the site I switched — it’s still under construction so it wasn’t an issue to mess with it — it immediately stopped the hangups. I couldn’t work on it five minutes ago, now it’s blazing. Could be that the latest update to WordPress just needed permalinks refreshed — as in, now I could switch back to Post and it will be fine. Just needed something to trigger a rewrite of them.

My 2 cents: Remember yesterday was the end of the month so everyone’s bandwidth is getting full and also I just upgraded my plan to the next level and my reseller is blazing fast, but then again it could be because it’s the first of the month. Prior to today, I was also experiencing that terrible lag…again.

Don’t think that’s it ponderconsulting. This started a few weeks ago so end of month wouldn’t affect it.

Here’s some more details to help narrow it down.
I have a WordPress plugin / theme package that I’m running for multiple clients. Exact same set up for all of them. A few are hosted on my Hostgator reseller server and are hanging like crazy when I try to work on them. Today I was doing updates to one of the ones that isn’t on Hostgator (can’t remember of the top of my head where they are) and it worked no problem.

I also have a dedicated server with Hostgator and a shared server. The dedicated has no problems. The shared and reseller do.

Changing the permalinks seemed like it helped but I have still had a couple of hangups, not as severe though.

Seems pretty clear to me at this point that whatever Hostgator is claiming about server load, etc. there is an issue with their shared / reseller servers. Partially confirmed by one tech support guy recommending that the “solution” to the problem was upgrading to a dedicated server.

I’ve been with Hostgator for 5+ years now but I think I’m going to have to scout out other options. What’s the point of offering a $30 a month reseller plan if it isn’t stable?

I’m adding myself to this thread as well.

My host is HostGator as well.

I’m in Kentucky.

I’ve only been involved in wordpress about four months, and I KNOW this didn’t happen for the first month or two.

I’ve disabled ALL plugins, switched to the default theme, etc… No success.

After diligently reading ALL replies to this thread… there are two things I am going to try…

1. The Permalinks
2. Call HostGator and see what I can dig up.

I run a minimal installation… maybe 10 pages, 20 posts, and a few plugins.

Josh, I’ve had some of these sites running on this reseller server for over a year. I never had this hanging issue so I never thought there was a problem. But in checking with clients I’m now finding out that apparently they have had sporadic slow connections in that period as well, just nothing bad enough that they bothered to complain to me. Post back what you find out from Hostgator but I really think the issue is over subscribed servers. The load may not be much but maybe they’ve got the MySQL max queries locked down to something low — WordPress can run a lot of queries generating a page so if there are lots of WordPress sites on a reseller server that could be the choke point.

I’m still waiting for my turn to use the telephone here ??

I’ve switched my permalinks from my setting, to something different, and back to my setting again.

I only did this an hour ago… but, so far, I haven’t experienced the lag.

Yeah… it’s not completely unbearable, but it’s enough to make you think somethings not right.

Usually, when the lag begins.. I just click another option. For example, if it hangs while I’m trying to view a post; I’ll click on something like “appearance” and back to posts again. Nine times out of ten, it will load with no lag the second time.

And I agree with what you said… it all started about two to three weeks ago. Was this around the time of the wordpress upgrade?

Fortunately, in the past 7 months, I haven’t experienced the lags or stalls I described above. Nothing really changed on the server side either, so I don’t know what the cause of the lag was. I’m running WordPress 3.3.1 now and it seems to be running just fine.

@wunderdojo, if you read the previous posts in this thread, I and others were experiecing these lags with WordPress 3.1.x and 3.2.x. The site I was having problems with is on a shared server and Hostgator support didn’t find anything unusual going on with the server, even while I had a support rep on the phone WHILE a stall was happening.

I can definitely understand how frustrating this can be, especially since no one knows why these stalls happen.

Here is my current WordPress configuration:

WordPress: 3.3.1

All in One SEO pack plugin: 1.6.13.8 (active)
BAAP Mobile Version plugin: 2.0 (active)
Contact Form 7 plugin: 3.1.1 (active)
Cron GUI plugin: 1.02 (active)
Lightbox Plus plugin: 2.4.6 (inactive)
Really Simple CAPTCHA plugin: 1.4 (active)
W3 Total Cache plugin: 0.9.2.4 (active)
WordPress Importer plugin: 0.5.2 (inactive)
WP-Cufón plugin: 1.6.10 (active)

Peace…

Well, I switched my permalinks to something new, and then back to my original setting.

I believe this has something to do with the .htaccess file.

So, I did this yesterday and my lags have ceased.

Can anyone else give it a try and see if their problem persists?

I did that also on 3 sites and it seemed to help a lot but there are so many variables tough to say.