dannymh

Hi,

I am the owner of Silvertails.net I can help you out with this.

Basically I run a cron that generates 3 seperate HTML items.

1 – The header
2 – The sidebar
3 – The footer.

I dump these into .html files using objects ino vriables then pushing the variable to the file.

In mybb I then wrote a very simple plugin which looks for <mainsite_header> etc and replaces them by including the .html files in place, using file_get_contents and the local path.

You need to do some transformation on the code that comes out of WP to make sure it stays relevant to your forum.

You then need to create a new stylesheet in your forum theme and change all of the class and id’s in the HTML to be prefaced with WP.

It sounds complex but creating the stylesheet is the longest part, once that is done it’s all automated.

I run a cron to do the HTML creation several times a day or on specific actions within wordpress, such as when a new post is made, that way I am not overloading my server too much with constant requests for creating the HTML which will slow down the response times for users.

You could probably do it by pumping it straight into your myBB cache which would make it somewhat faster but my mybb runs fairly quickly so I haven’t felt the need.

If you have issues contact me at silvertails.net and I will help you out some more.

Dan

Hmm loading fine for me now on all devices and different connections, odd it’s slow for you

Ok after a little more time looking at this and a clearer head I was able to determine where a lot of the speed issues were coming from.

The database where the advertising was kept was locking and causing slow queries. I now sync the data for the advertising in the background between the systems as to not have to make an external database call and free up time, as really the advertising storage database can be a storage engine only and only hits and clicks change with any regularity so a daily sync and null works for this.

Additionally there were a number of internal http: requests that were going on which were leading to speed issues, these requests were doing various things like loading HTML files via readfile or file_get_contents which is part of the forum integration, I changed this to a relative path and it cut the load time of those down significantly, saving my 5 seconds per load.

Once I rebooted the server to clear the locks on the database and start fresh, I changed the w3 total cache to use disk enhanced as suggested and now I am getting much faster load times averaging around 4 seconds with the majority of that being the core of wordpress and only 3% being plugins according to the p3 plugin profiler.

I am going to look at making the paths to the styles and the javascripts relative also which hopefully will shave a few more fractions of second off the load as we wont be running http requests to get them.

Cheers
Dan

Also mysql query cache is enabled

I have now upgraded to mysql 5.5 and removing minify now

and bizarely the issue just returned

Mysteriously its started running really fast again

oh and uploading as plain HTML is fast.

If you take a look at https://www.silvertails.net/forum I generate the HTML from the forums for the header, right hand menu and footer, then wrap my forum into it.

I generate those via a cron task that runs once every few hours on the wordpress side, so I get the exact same content i.e. posts, adverts etc and the page loads fairly quickly

It seems the issue my be something to do with connection to the DB somewhere. Looks like103 queries to generate the fronte page, that is excessive

I have disabled the advertising for a while.

I have seen no improvement on the speeds

– Memory is 2GB
– Frontend is using around 13MB
– MySQL 5.1.72
– PHP 5.4.21
– Apache 2.4.6
– OS is CentOS need to upgrade as I am on 5.9 but requires a reprovision of the server and don’t have the time capacity to backup reprovision and reload the entire server at this stage.

Active Plugins: 12 many of these are optimization ones I have added in the last few days to try to minify and speed things up a little

Nothing that should be load consming there. Smush.it may be one of them, but that came in after the load issues.

Prior to the load issues the only things I had active were
– mybb post coupler (this creates a mybb post when a wordpress post is created)
– External DB auth (I authenticate users by the mybb db)
– bbpress2bbcode
– ST HTML generator (a simple plugin that uses cURL to grab comments from mybb, this times out very quickly so should not cause an issue, I will disable it thought)
– Advertsing generator (the way this works is that it pulls an advert from the mybb DB, and then uses readfile() to actually grab the advert

I disabled wordfence in case this was causing the issue.
I also disabled CSF on the server as well to see if this was slowing things down
Dan

urrghh I meant 3.7 sorry.

The adds are a part of the overall load I will grant you that, but these calls wont prevent the actual content of the page loading. The slowness comes before the calls to these ads and persists even with the advertising (plugin) disabled and removed completely

Those calls do slow down the overall load. When I remove all of that and go back to the default theme however I see the same issue

It works more like this

– Click on link to article
– Page spins on current page for a good 15 or more seconds
– screen goes white
– page loads slowly

Its almost like its in the retrieval of that page, could the permalink structure somehow be causing a long running lookup?

I also cleaned up the database a little getting rid of a few of the usual overheads like autosave drafts etc and made sure I optimized it all too

kmessinger: no insights at the pagespeed site, its hard for me to get it to hit a non-cached page. it scores in varying scores of 70 and up

– nothing there that would lead to slow down, a few notices but nothing that would slow things down

– 1GB

– 38MB database about 5000 articles

– Traffic varies, we are pretty quiet at the moment about 91000 pageviews a day, which is about 4000 unique users

I should add that the admin is at a crawl too

Dan

Whilst I know there “Was nothing in 3.8 that could have caused this” A quick search of the internet reveals that there are a quite a few people experiencing the same thing.

I can pinpoint the slowdown to exactly after I upgraded to 3.8. Everything was fine before then and all other parts of my site are fine, which do not run on wordpress. so it seems there is something that could have caused this.

Failing that there must be someone on here with a path to discovering root cause right?

I mean, I can tail whatever logs need tailing, I can dump php or whatever we need, but I don’t know that saying there was nothing in it is the best way to try to solve a problem.

Don’t get me wrong, i am not ungrateful for your assistance, it’s just I’d rather tackle this head on and have tried all the standard steps