[Jerry]

I am running WP 3.9.2, U-Design theme, Connections 0.8.13. The admin section will not load at all in Google chrome, it will load in IE.

[Steven Zahm]

@ Jerry

My best guess without be able to see the issue is that the memory assigned to PHP is being exhausted. Here’s a link to an excellent blog post that covers several different methods on increasing this limit. Which method that will work for you really depends on the host. I suggest starting at the top and working your way down the list to see if one of them resolves the issue for you.

If that does not work, then it may be some type of plugin conflict. I suggest temporarily deactivating all unrelated Connections plugins. Likely the issue will resolve at this point. Activate them one at a time until the issue returns. When the issue returns, the last plugin activated was the conflict.

Let me know what you find out. Hope that helps!

[Jerry]

Hey Steven,

Thanks for the prompt reply.

The site runs pretty fast (1 to 2 seconds) sometimes but, most of the time it takes 10 to 15 seconds for a page to load. Would the reasons stated above have a bearing on page loading time also. Would a dedicated server help?

Thanks,

Jerry

[Jerry]

Hey Steve,

I just got this email from my host.

“We already addressed issues with the PHP memory limits and have even changed execution time.
Connections just seems to be poorly written as we are experimenting with databases caches to no avail. It seems Connections software may require a ‘ramped’ up hosting account and our ‘cloud’ hosting may not fit the bill.”

Then This one.

“He makes a reference to the technology being the issue. The compute cycle processes are bogging down our hosting. I could recommend a couple of hosting services to handle the Connections processing and migrate for free.

Any thoughts? Does he recommend a hosting platform that supports his software’s limitations?”

Bailscoopusa.com is a large website. Its database has about 20,000 entries. Among other things.

Any recommendations on who could host this type of website comfortably?

[Steven Zahm]

@ Jerry

First time I’ve heard that Connections was poorly written … I usually hear quite the opposite from other devs who use it for their clients with site as large dbs, more than 20K entries.

Any way … I know it is not your hosts job to debug the code, but, if they have specific area(s) which they can point to as being an issue being caused by Connections. I will definitely look into those and make what ever fixes may be necessary.

With that said, I browsed around your site and I see what you mean by slow loading. Some definitely seems “hokey”. I’ll try to explain.

When I click a state and I’m presented with a list of city links. These seem to be hand created on the page, yes? Ok…

Lets say I click on Idaho and then click on any city, looking at the network activity, the first thing that happens is a 301 page redirect. This redirect seems to be the bulk of the page load. You can view this for yourself by opening the pages in Chrome with the dev tools open, hit F12 and then click the network tab. After the pages load scroll to the top of the requests. Every page I visited the first request is a 301 redirect. That important because a redirect in WP will occur before the Connections shortcode runs and that’s the meat of any processing Connections does. Anything before that, Connections related, takes mere milliseconds.

When I visit PA, thing are better. It seems most pages/cities do not have this redirect and the page load in about 3–5 seconds which is about average for a WP site without caching (I see W3TC is being used, but lets ignore that for the moment) even and WP tuned managed hosts. This load time is indistinguishable from page load time where Connections is not being used like the About us, Bail Jumpers, Bail Tails, FAQ and Feedback pages.

It could be that the current service level that you are subscribed to with the host is not enough. It appears the site might be hosted with GoDaddy. Is that correct? At the very least, the domain seems to be registered thru them. Any way, if you are on their basic shared hosting plan you could very well be being throttled (very common on shared hosting, cycle have to be available to all the accounts on the server which can range into the hundreds) depending how popular your site is. That could explain why page load times vary quite bit, even why some pages and the admin fail to load.

Back to W3TC. I see after a page is cached by W3TC, the page loads in about a half second. You could setup its preload or prime the cache. What this does is it’ll crawl your site in the background pre-caching the pages. That could help significantly as you users should only hit a “slow” page if it isn’t already preloaded in the cache. Even though I have not used it yet (I will be giving it a try very soon), I’ve heard some pretty good things about WP Rocket (I’m in no way affiliated), ie lighter and faster than W3TC while being easier to configure. There is a cost attached to the plugin but it could be worthwhile checking out if you have the time and funds available.

[Jerry]

Hey Steve,

I am sure the “poorly written” is out of frustration.

The 301 is because Idaho is not complete as PA is. I have about 5 states to complete and haven’t done them yet due to the problems we are having.

The host is with Rackspace cloud, I am sure it is a basic shared plan.

We tried caching with Cloudflare but, it created more problems than it solved.

Jerry

[Jerry]

Also, What host service would you recommend and what level of service do you think would be adequate?

I do very much appreciate your time and effort. Getting this website built and running properly has without a doubt been the biggest challenge (besides be born, from what I can remember that was quite a struggle) I have ever undertaken in my life.

Again many thanks,

Jerry

[Steven Zahm]

@ Jerry

Ok, yeah, Cloudflare would work very well because, I think, the issue is with the PHP parsing which would be on the server. Not much Cloudflare can do there. That why you need a caching plugin like W3TC.

Rackspace … is that their CloudSite service you’re using? I used them briefly for this site (I moved to a managed VPS) because I thought I could scale as needed. I found that it to be much slower than when it was hosted on Bluehost at their Business Pro service level (which actually worked pretty darned wull in hindsight). The speed was actually even worse when I used W3TC on CloudSites. WP Super Cache seems to work much, much better … at the very least I suggest try switching to it.

You may find this artical enlightening:
http://www.wpsitecare.com/performance-of-7-top-wordpress-hosting-companies-compared/

Looks like Site Ground Go Geek Plan would be quite nice… as well is InMotion Business Hosting Pro for shared hosting.

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