john.coleman24

Nevermind, I got it. Turns out it was a bad Chrome cache (probably due to the forwarding earlier). Clearing the cache for the day fixed it.

FYI, it is only doing this in chrome. Any help would be huge. Thank you!

OK, so I fixed this issue, but in a somewhat unorthodox/kludgey way. But, for the benefit of anyone who reads this later, here is how I got the speed up.

The issue was external website calls from WordPress. Tracking these down was no easy feat. What ended up working the best, mentioned by @wpranger was to install a network monitor on the server. Since this is a Windows Server, I used Microsoft Network Monitor:

Microsoft Network Monitor

But, that wasn’t enough to trap these. That is, since there is no Internet access, these requests were never making it out of the network card of the server. So, what I did was setup a test server (with just WP installed on it), used my main server as the DNS server, and then logged all DNS requests.

From there, I was able to trap a list of all of the hosts MY installation was trying to call. To simplify things, I installed a plugin to completely turn off core updates, and I removed the URI’s and version numbers from my plugins to keep them from checking for updates.

Then, with my list of DNS requests, I simply set each host to my localhost IP in my hosts file. As such, here is what my hosts file looks like (yours might be different, based on your plugins):

127.0.0.1 fonts.googleapis.com
127.0.0.1 1.gravatar.com
127.0.0.1 www.remarpro.com
127.0.0.1 gmpg.org
127.0.0.1 0.gravatar.com
127.0.0.1 https://www.w3.org
127.0.0.1 update.www.remarpro.com
127.0.0.1 api.www.remarpro.com
127.0.0.1 ajax.aspnetcdn.com
127.0.0.1 planet.www.remarpro.com
127.0.0.1 codex.www.remarpro.com

Once I made those additions to my host file, WordPress runs about 20X faster (page loads in much less than a second, vs 5-10 seconds). It would be nice if there was a plugin that did this, but again, I get that I am an edge case. I hope that helps!

@pioneer, I appreciate the help, but I am not sure where you are going with that. Lack of Internet is not a group policy, or even firewall setting. There is physically no Internet in this facility.

@wpranger, that is a good idea. It is a Win2008 Server, so I will look around for some options. My gut is that it is the core updates that are the biggest problem, but I am betting there are some API calls (or something similar) in there too.

Thanks for the help!

It is school provided, it is also the file/print server for the class.

Maybe I am not understanding you, but the WordPress server is in the classroom. And, WordPress is up and works, other than being too slow to actually use. My thought is that it is so slow because of a complete lack of Internet access, so my hope is that there is some way to disable all external calls. I am not looking to violate any policy, I just want to stand up a local, offline WordPress server with a “normal” level of performance.

Thanks for your reply. To put it simply, internet access is strictly forbidden and will never be an option.

However, it is a program teaching graphic design, web design, scripting, UI design, etc., and having a working, contemporary platform to deploy to would really help the program out. As such, I am hopeful to find a way to make WordPress run (happily) in a fully offline environment.