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I am starting to build the structure of the new forum, and although I still have zero Threads and zero Load on the Forum, I have a major problem issue, that makes me wonder, weather this Forum is usable.
Let me explain.
(1) The technical Setup
I am on a dedicated server, not a big one, but all performance monitors show a decent performance and the server is far from being on the edge. There is still plenty of headroom in CPU Load, Memory, I/O etc. Data from Google Pagespeed shows a good performance too. So the server and the infrastructure seems not to be the issue here.
Also, the issue is not browser dependend. I testet several browser from Mozilla, over Edge to Chrome and all show similar performance characteristics with simple:press as described below.
As of now, I am not using a caching plugin for wordpress, as this was unnecessary until now and I prefer raw server power instead of caching. If the server would be the bottleneck, I would simply enhance its hardware. But the server seems OK and is idle most of the time.
Also I have the checkmarks in your options set for combining and caching CSS as well as for Script (JS). Error logging is disabled too.
I loud about 12 plugins from your library. But I tested without the plugins and although a small positive effect is there, the major performance issue still exists even without any plugin activated.
(2) Mingle Reference Performance
At the moment I run Mingle Forum with currently 2.300 Threads, 25.000 Posts.
Loading the complete Mingle Forum Structure on the top level page with all Groups and Forums, costs around 20 seconds from an end user perspective. That is a lot, but in this case acceptable.
Loading a single Mingle forum within the structure, costs around 5 seconds. It could be better, but this is acceptable too. Dont forget, this is during "Live" loadtime - users are accessing the Mingle Forum in parallel.
So thats the reference for simple:press. If simple:press could give me a similar performance under load, it would be OK.
(3) The major Performance Issue
Now I am building my Group and Forum structure in simple:press and have 6 Groups and 40 Forums.
And I have still zero Threads and Posts and no load at all on the forum itself.
Loadtime for the top forum structure is more than 30 seconds. Inacceptable.
Loadtime of a singe forum (zero thread) is about 15 seconds. Completely inacceptable. This renders the forum unusable.
I dont want to guess, what load would mean to this performance. Something seems terribly wrong.
I see for example your forum here and although it is not super fast, it is OK for me. Nothing compared to what I experience.
(4) Question and Advice
I am well aware, that performance is a delicate thing with many interdependencies and there will be no easy fix.
But this behaviour seems to hint to a general problem. Tweeking 20% out of the system by whatever means would be nice, but would not adress the major problem.
Or in other words, if the time to access a single forum or thread goes down from 15 to 12 seconds, it would be still unusable. 5 seconds and lower is something, that can be accepted from a user perspective, although it is still not fast.
What I need is advice where to look. Somewhere must be a major bottleneck and as the server and the web infrastructure shows no sign of stress and all other services (wordpress, Mingle etc) run without any performance problems, the bottleneck seems to either be within simple:press or maybe the result of some strange interdependency.
What can I do, to reach an acceptable performance? The current status is unfortunately nothing, I could show my customers, this would make them mad.
Thanks in advance.
Hari
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first, agree caching is not needed and in fact, unless a custom instantiation will not work with the forum - its content is dynamic (all content appears on single wp page) and would need to be disabled for the forum page... which is why we do are own internal caching...
but not much info here... which page views? group, forum, etc? the more you display on a single page, the more resources needed... for example, if on topic view, you show 100 posts per page, it will be slower than if you showed 10... you have 40 forums which is a large number... shouldnt be a big issue on decent server (just about any dedicated would qualify), but worth an investigation if your slow down is on group view (is that what you mean by top forum structure?)...
are you using any of our plugins? or template tags in sidebar (such as recent posts)???
do you get same if you temp disable Mingle? we had one user report odd slow downs with both active (though many others did not)...
have you run tests with other wp plugins disabled? normal expectation would be no difference, but its a data point..
on group view, how many db queries are you seeing? are any of them 'slow' by mysql? if you dont know how to look at this, would suggest the wonderful wp debug bar plugin with some of the add on plugins (debug bar extender, debug bar slow actions or debug bar query tracer for example)...
are you seeing any needless page redirects going on (live http headers or similar for firefox helps)? any particular http requests taking inordinate amount of time?
what are you doing with avatars and simple press? forum - profiles - avatars... what is the priority order? and are you replacing wp avatars? just want to make sure not some sort of looping going on...
its not a general problem for users - we have some users with well over a million posts and routinely have hundreds of users on the site at same time.. we have large number of users running simple press on horrible shared hosting...
with some data, should be possible to figure out what is going on...
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MrPapa,
thanks, but most of your questions are already answered within my careful created and structured post. Would be nice, if you could read that again.
For example:
ZERO POSTS - forums not under load yet. I am in the construction phase. Just the (empty) structure of 40 forums and 6 groups.
12 Plugins, but performance issue exists without any of them too.
No current load by users - instead of myself. 😉
No Avatars used yet, individual loaded avatars as first option, then standard sp avatars. Should be no problem.
Disabling Mingle is not an option, as I will not migrate the content, but will offer the old mingle forum as archive with read only.
DB queries not checked yet, but as all other services including mingle show no problem, this seems not probable as cause.
Any concrete hints and ideas after fully rereading my post?
Thanks
PS:
I deactivated the mingle recent post widget, that had the interdependency with your recent post widget.
So as a test case:
No recent post widgets of neither mingle nor SP.
The result, loading the main structure of the SP forum - again with ZERO POSTS and ZERO LOAD is:
42 seconds!
Also I still see no other load issue anywhere beside simple:press. Everything runs smooth from wordpress to mingle, just 42 seconds for an empty SP forum structure.
Something seems very wrong and I have no idea, what it could be....
PPS:
Tried "WP Debug Bar" plus "Debug Bar Slow Actions" as you proposed. Set WP Debug Mode to True.
Result when accessing SP Main Structure is "500 Internal Server Error" after more than 60 seconds of wait time. The plugin is not updated since more than 1 year so it doesnt make a lot of sense to spend time in chasing the cause here.
After going back to Debug Mode = False and deactivating the Plugin, the timeframe for loading SP main structure was back to roughly 40 seconds as before.
Something seems very wrong and I have no idea, what it could be....
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PPPS:
Tested on test installation without ANY load and ANY posts at all. An empty installation, just with the identical setup as the live installation.
Calling SP in Debug mode shows:
It is not 100% clear, weather this is 100% identical to the Live system, as SP runs into an 500 internal server error in debug mode there.
Just of notice: the fixes for /admin/panel-profiles/forms/spa-profiles-options-form.php are applied.
Now every bullet of your list is applied, concrete advice needed.
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PPPPS:
it starts to get frustrating.
Within 2 additional hours of work, I deactivated almost any plugin and widget and tried again.
All the major plugins used have been deactivated including Mingle and S2 Members, but the problem persists.
Loading SP with an empty structure of empty forum now needs 50+ seconds. Ridiculous.
Everything else is working perfectly fine. The server is fine without any bottleneck.
I am lost. Obviously I need more from you, than just a quick scan of 50% of what I have written.
I am fully aware, that it is not your job to debug my installation, its mine.
But what I need from you, are more concret hints and ideas what to debug in SP and where to look.
Everything I see hints to SP itself as the cause.
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As someone that used mingle and converted to SP I would recommend disabling mingle and checking the performance. If it fixes it like the recent post widget issue and you want to keep the mingle forum as an archive I would do a full import from mingle to simple press and create a archive forum and then create a sub-forum structure under archives that mimics your mingle forum, then migrate all the threads from the main forum structure to the sub forums under archives. You can use redirects to fix any links to the mingle forum that may be floating out there
One other question that I haven't seen asked, have you tried using one of the default wp themes instead of generatepress? I installed it on my staging server and tested and didn't see a noticeable impact on speed but it may be worth ruling out.
If you do decide to do the import into an archives forum let me know and I can share the redirect rules we have set up, they may need to be tweaked a little but should be easy to figure out.
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Thxs kvr28, I appreciate your advice. But I completly deactivated Mingle during the last 2 hours as a test, with no effect on the performance issue.
No, I didnt change GeneratePress. This is simple not possible, as it was a long search, kissing many frogs, to finally find a capable theme fitting my needs. And I have a business based on this, this is nothing I simply change. Before I move away from Generate Press, I will dump SP again.
But I am not willing to think that final option yet. Its far too early for that, and I have invested too much time in SP already, to move away easily. And I still like SP, if it works ....The SP guys have not really tried to address my problem yet, but I very much hope they will.
The performance with an empty! forum is so bad (40-50 seconds on a dedicated server mostly idle) that there must be a concrete loop/bootleneck somewhere causing this. This cant be the true SP performance, otherwise SP would have no customers. 😉
Such a replicable bootleneck, should be far more easy to find, than problems that occur erratic without system.
But in order to do that I need help and hints, where possible causes in SP may exist and how to debug them.
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please keep in mind that its a holiday weekend so we are a bit scarce for next couple days... but will be back later tonight to try to answer some of this...
Visit Cruise Talk Central and Mr Papa's World
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Who do you use for hosting if you don't mind me asking? I had some issues with hostgator and godaddy and since switching to a different managed hosting solution it's been pretty much flawless.
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Sure MrPapa, I am aware of that and I am "Papa" (daddy in german) myself 😉 and family is important. No need for apologies and I dont expect 24 hour weekend service for roughly 100 bucks. 😉
So I dont expect anything over the weekend. If you are able to look into, I appreciate that highly, but if not, its fine too for me.
But beginning of next week, please try to work with me step by step, until we find this *&%$§* bottleneck.
Thanks
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