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Simple:Press Version 5.5 – Performance Improvements

MP Mr Papa
Mr Papa
Member
Member since Dec 2006
19,448 posts
May 23, 2014 · 12:49 pm · Edited

update-newsWe are getting near the end of development of Simple:Press 5.5 and are deep into the testing phase. If all goes to plan, we hope to release 5.5 the weekend of June 1. One of the things we recently completed on 5.5. was another serious round of database query optimization.

With some of the structural changes made in recent versions, ie adding of more caching and reusable objects, it was time again to see how much more db performance we could eek out. Depending on your configuration and plugins in play, you may see as much as a 33% reduction in the number of queries on the main forum page views of group, forum and topic views. That is a significant reduction in query numbers but may not mean a pure 33% performance increase in rendering because not all queries are created equal. But, things should be snappier!

Potentially even more important, we have identified areas for further work (too late in 5.5 cycle for large changes) on caching and db queries. We will hit those during the 5.5.1 development efforts.

16 Answers

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BL Blaise
Blaise
Member
Member since Sep 2013
139 posts
May 30, 2014 · 2:56 am

This is fantastic news. I’m so glad you’re working and focusing on performance. Can’t wait for this! Are we still on track for this week end?

 

Blaise

YS Yellow Swordfish
Yellow Swordfish
Member
Member since Nov 2008
16,437 posts
May 30, 2014 · 4:30 am

We try to put a performance review and as much optimisation as we can get done in most ‘.0’ releases (i.e., 5.5.0 which is coming) and also identify other areas we can work on through the life of this point updates.

As to when… let’s just say within a few days but hopefully early.

BL Blaise
Blaise
Member
Member since Sep 2013
139 posts
May 30, 2014 · 10:32 am

Great! This is very welcome news. I’ll be holding my breath for this moment.

 

Blaise

BL Blaise
Blaise
Member
Member since Sep 2013
139 posts
May 30, 2014 · 10:47 am

Hi,

 

I’m not sure of the scale of other sites. But I have 8000 members and between 30-60 connected at the same time. This is running on a dedicated nginx server. Despite this the forum pages are the slowest of my site and my priority in terms of performance improvement.

I also leverage a CDN for all static resources.

Despite this end-user page load time for the forum pages is between 8 and 12 seconds (I benchmark this every day).

Kind regards,

 Blaise

YS Yellow Swordfish
Yellow Swordfish
Member
Member since Nov 2008
16,437 posts
May 30, 2014 · 12:06 pm

By it’s very nature and the fact that it is a data intensive structure – forums will always be slower than more static data items like WP posts and pages etc. It is the nature of the beast.

What might be more of interest to you coming in the 5.5.0 release is support for innoDB tables plus a small plugin to enable you to update all of your forum tables to the innoDB engine. You can find a topic on this earlier in this forum.

BL Blaise
Blaise
Member
Member since Sep 2013
139 posts
Jun 1, 2014 · 9:35 am

Hi,

 

Yes, I have read the blog post twice but it’s still way above my head what this really means – both technically and from a real life performance perspective. 

Are we on track for the launch today?

Thanks

Blaise

UN
Unknown
Member
Jun 10, 2014 · 3:32 am

@Blaise Fiedler, I would love to know if you have noticed an improvement since installing the new 5.5

I run a membership site with the WP plugin Wishlist with a few thousand active members and I am highly considering going with SimplePress because of it’s functionality and feel.  I too worry about load times.

YS Yellow Swordfish
Yellow Swordfish
Member
Member since Nov 2008
16,437 posts
Jun 10, 2014 · 5:20 am

Be interesting to know if you have tried the innoDB table option as well. (Having made a DB backup before changing of course!)

KV kvr28
kvr28
Member
Member since Mar 2014
804 posts
Jun 10, 2014 · 8:22 am

yellow where would we find that option, I don’t see a setting for that in the sp admin area

YS Yellow Swordfish
Yellow Swordfish
Member
Member since Nov 2008
16,437 posts
Jun 10, 2014 · 12:05 pm

Well it’s not an option as such. You either change the database tables to use the mySQL innoDB engine or you keep using the MyISAM engine which is probably the default. Are you not already on innoDB because of your host forcing the issue?

We do have a small WP plugin that will perform the convert. We need to get it up on our download page…

KV kvr28
kvr28
Member
Member since Mar 2014
804 posts
Jun 10, 2014 · 12:18 pm

yes, still using it, was just curious how one would be able to choose, if was manually done or if there was a option for it

YS Yellow Swordfish
Yellow Swordfish
Member
Member since Nov 2008
16,437 posts
Jun 10, 2014 · 5:23 pm

Ah! Manual. All our plugin does, of course, is automate that manual process :)