sent you via form of your website. thxs.

PS: Forget the link. I did not think far enough. It cant work that easy way, as the forum is behind a S2 members paywall and cant be seen from outside. You would need an access code and I would need to provide you with admin access to see all forums in full. Impementing all this would cost me more time to explain, than it would help.

Unfortunately I need to figure that problem out myself within my system, supported by hints and guidance from others.

But your question was indirectly helpfull. As a test, I now called the forum link not as an admin with full access, but with lower access rights, only seeing 2 of the 40 forums as a test.

The result is: 6 seconds instead of 40.

So there is obviously not ONE major bottleneck, but loading every forum and group takes its (too much) time.

Maybe the problem is related to the S2 Members access logic. Unfortunately I cant just kill S2 Members in general as this protects my content. And shortly deactivating it, didnt make any effect.

But it is still a valid theory, that the access rights slow things down to much, because of some sort of interface problem of SP with S2 Members access logic.

I will do some more thinking.on that assumption, until the SP guys come up with further ideas.

Anyway FidoSysop, thanks for trying to be helpful. I appreciate that. At least it created another idea/path to follow. Have a nice weekend.

Hi Hari, that makes sense. I noticed about a 50% difference between your wordpress home and forum page when running a speed test on Pingdom.com..

Your sites performance grade is really impressive on pingdom. I wished mine got that high of a score!

I have no idea what S2 members paywall is (cdn?) but if you are loading sp’s scripts through it that could be the bottleneck.

Personally if your worrying about content scrapers and spam bots attacking your forum content, slap it behind CloudFlare pro act firewall. You can also run in https / tls encryption provided by cf. I run my sites in full https with certificates on both ends and authenticated server pulls to stop any possible scrapers or sniffers on my server ip.

Best wishes and hope you get it figured out soon. Any other questions let me know.

Regards, Ed.

could you share the link with us (yelllow swordfish, Ike and mr papa) as well…  if you dont want to post, please send to all of us via PM with a link to this topic so we know for sure what it concerns…I can take a look at some of this missing data I asked for…

doesnt matter on age of plugin (ie wp debug) if there is no reason for it to be updated…

this is a mostly singular issue as general issues are not experiencing so we have to ask lots of questions… same for S2 Member as a fair number of simple press users use it…  nor is 40 forums a particular problem either – though not recommended have seen hundreds of forums…  we just need to dig in and see if we can see anything..

Mr. Papa, all three of you got mail as requested. Sorry for an additional zero-content-mail, I did some misstyping in the first time (didnt expect that “enter” sends the mail ;))

Let me say, that I highly value you looking into this on holiday weekend. I dont expect this and the problem is not time critical in terms of hours, as the forum is not live yet. So take your time for your families!

All I want is, to sort this out during the course of the coming week.

As far as S2 Members is concerned, I did some additional thinking and I agree with you – I dont think this has to do with the problem.

Reason is, that from my understanding, your rights management in SP uses the WP Roles and there is simply no “authorization ping pong” with S2 members involved before accessing a forum, that could cause a performance degradation.

What you need to know in addition is, that in my SP customization I have SP 8 user groups, based on 7 wp roles provided by WP/S2M.

In addition I have 4 “access sets” set in SP admin panel (dont know the right term, as I see the SP admin in german in front of me, need to guess ;))

The mix of 8 user groups together with 4 access sets, is used in different combination on the 40 forums, to explicitly direct the user to the right forum, he should have access to.

This as information just in case, the access rights mechanic of SP has to do with the problem.

You can contact me here, but much better directly via the mail of my account, as I dont check this PM regulary. But contacting me via my mail, will normaly result in response within an hour.

Thanks again! Hari

afraid we will need some sort of access to the forum so we can access the page.. without it, cannot see much…

ideally, in order to look around, it would be both a wp admin and sp admin… if not doable, it at least needs to be able to access the wp page…  please pm the account details to the same 3 folks…

Admin access is not an option unfortunately. Its not a matter of trust, its just a too high risk to me, that  3 people not knowing the specifics of the setup act around on a live system with paying customers. I dont fear that you do some wrong intential, i fear the unintended sideeffects. I hope you understand.

But I liftet the S2 members ban from the SP forum page. So you should be able to access this as “guest”. Please note, that the performance you will see, will be much better (5-6 seconds) compared to my scenario (40-50 seconds).

The difference comes from the fact, that as a “guest” you will not have access to the forums and therefore they will not load when calling the forum.

If it helps, I would be able to give you member access (not admin, member access). With member access, you could see the majority of the forums and therefore should be able to at least reproduce the significant load time from own experience.

Let me know if that would help, I will send access via PM then.

Please note that I am to bed soon, it is midnight here. 🙂

Just in case, I provided temporary member access, so you can see performance for yourself.

You got mail 🙂

Good night

that is quite odd…  there is zero http activity for quite some time (5-6 seconds) before the page loads…  the lack of http activity means that most simple press processing has not even begun yet…  certainly almost no queries related to page rendering…  actually, other wp plugins havent really run a this point either…  so while this does not guarantee any forum db queries, none that gather forum data would have been initiated…  they would generally be very small, minor queries – the one perhaps exception would be a query to set up the current user (dont know if this has run yet before the big no http activity delay has ended)…

as a plugin for wp, we have to hook into various processing hooks and filters to do things… one of the very first thing we do is generate the page head tags data which include http requests…  those do not begin during this ‘silent’ time..

running various page insights tools and header tracking tools indicate the same thing… something is basically preventing general processing from beginning… not sure I have much idea currently as I lack many usable tools on the server…  now it could still be plugin, theme or wp core.. but oddly, most plugins wont be doing much during this no activity time…  most of the online tools recommend doingn something about the block js that needs to load, but that isnt really the issue since each of those requires an http request and those are not occurring during the initial no activity time (same for css or other http activity)…

I also find it interesting that it gets worse as a wp admin (likely an sp admin as well)… we have very little ‘different’ processing based on admin status..  it would just be the display of some elements, but the display processing clearly has not begun during this no http activity time period…  do you know of anything different that happens on your front end for an admin vs not?  Generally, wp does not thing different of significance (of course plugins and themes can change that)…

the only other plugin I see in your list that makes me pause is the ithemes security plugin.- not sure what it does… but assume when you said you disabled other plugins that you included that one…

I see a very minor difference between logged in as user and when as guest…  which really jives since the big no activity delay in the page load is well before we start processing forum queries or display code…  and very, very odd for admin as mentioned before because any difference between admin and user will be negligible – and the delay is long before that processing…

Would also be curious if it still happens with default wp theme, but you said you cannot do that switch for a test… and assume you dont have a test mirror or site?

maybe Andy has some other thoughts?  will be back to investigate some more tomorrow…

Good Morning all,

thanks MrPapa, I think we are now moving in the right direction. All we need to do now, is to isolate the problem step by step.

As reaction to your observations, I did the following:

(1) iThemes Security

I deactivated iThemes Security for a brief moment (dont want to make this too long, as I have a lot of brute force attacks) completely again – just to be sure, as the profile of what you describe, points into the direction of something blocking something -> No effect

(2) Generate Press

For a short moment – hopefully noone saw the mess 😉 – I changed from Generate Press to the TwelveFifteen standard theme of wordpress.

Interesting effect. The load time goes down from 40+ to 25+ seconds. But this is still far too long for an empty structure, so Generate Press doesnt seem to be the cause by itself, but whatever is causing is, has side effects and a more complex theme increases the effect.

(3) Test System

I have a test system with (almost) identical setup. The problem is, it isnt 1to1. It lacks the full database and I cant be 100% sure, whether I tweeked every option identical – they are simply too much.

So I cant replicate the problem there in full.

What I would need is a tool on my server, that would allow to copy the complete wordpress installation to another installation (thats easy) but immediately change the top level http references to the new domain too. A sort of One-Click replication to a new domain.

I dont know such tool thats really working. All I tried yet, created a mess. If you have any idea, let me know. On this test system, I surely could give you admin access.

But I believe from a productivity standpoint, it is still better to isolate the problem on the system where it exists, because even after duplicating to the test system, you never know if you missed a small detail that is still different and is the cause.

(4) Admin Tools

Just tell me, what debugging tools I shall install and use, to provide you with further information / logs / traces on the subject and I am happy to do it myself and provide you with the results.

Thanks again!

PS: I will contact Tom Usborne from Generate Press in parallel, maybe he can add some insight or idea what is going on here.

maybe Andy has some other thoughts?

Sadly no. This is clearly environmental or server related which is not an area I have much personal hands-on experience of.  And I don’t believe I have seen one with this sort of lag before.

the only other plugin I see in your list that makes me pause is the ithemes security plugin.- not sure what it does… but assume when you said you disabled other plugins that you included that one…

Experience does suggest that these sort of plugins can be a dual-edged sword – but it should be noted that deactivating this particular one does not undo any changes it made to the DB, folders/files, .htaccess etc. It says that on the box. So if, in some way it was causing an issue, it might not be evident by simply deactivating it.

Would also be curious if it still happens with default wp theme

I have downloaded and installed the GeneratePress theme – at least the free version without any of the paid for add-ons. It seems basically harmless. Looking at the generated source of Hari’s site I have to say I was most unimpressed with the reams of inline CSS being generated but I doubt that has much of an impact on performance. Of course, I have no idea of the extent of the theme settings or optional extras so this may still be worth exploring.

One thing I would suggest is to load the forum JavaScript in the footer (forum admin > integration > page and permalink). I don’t expect any major change but it might be interesting to see if it has any bearing on the period of inactivity.

If it were me – and the facilities were available – I would be quickly building a duplicate site with only Simple:Press active and then adding the same plugin set one at a time until something showed up. But at the end of the day, @mr-papa has more knowledge of server setups and tools than I and he will be back later on.

[update] – looks like you posted while I was writing this but I will add this to the thread anyway…

Loaded JSript in the footer as proposed – no sizeable effect

Mornin Y’all..

This plugin works great for changing urls.

https://wordpress.org/plugins/velvet-blues-update-urls/

What part of simplepress is living on that S2 paywall? Or what is being routed through it?

I’m not the brightest bulb in the string – but it makes sense in theory the hops between me and your server in DE. Then the forum content has to be loaded or funneled through S2 which is probably in the US. Which has to hop back to DE then through your server and back to me. That has to increase the load time.

Just my two cents worth on the subject.

HEUREKA!

Folks, stop everything what you are doing, if you are doing something in this matter.

I FOUND IT :)))

It is an incompatibility between the plugin wpSEO and SP !!

After I deactivated wpSEO again, the problem went away and SP loads within 3 seconds :))))

Question is, why didnt I recognize this in my first round of deactivating every plugin?

I have not the faintest idea. I could *swear*, that I did it before and it had no effect. But in the end, I cant completly exclude an error on my side.

I was checking so many thinks in parallel, maybe I got a phone call in between and later just *thought* that I had deactivated it, I have no idea why I have overseen this before.

But fact is, in my frustration on todays sunday I was repeating all the deactivations – just in case and to be 100& sure.

Result: the lockup is gone when wpSEO is deactivated.

This does not say, that wpSEO is the CAUSE, because they could make the valid argument, that everything on their side was acting fine, until SP came into play. But whatever, at least it is obvious, that the interdepency between both creates the problem!

This still leads to the question WHY and WHAT is causing this? But this has not the major priority any more, because there are other SEO plugins I could use.

In the next step I will contact the developer of wp SEO and see, what he has to offer as a potential cause.

Maybe later in the process I come back to you, because it still makes sense to find the cause, because maybe this interdependency will raise its ugly head somewhere else.

But on this (rainy) sunday here in Germany I can say: problem identified. You are “of the hook” for the next steps. 🙂

Thanks for trying to help. I know from long experience, that such interdependencies between different software are one of the most ugly problems one could have, because you never know where to start.

Have a nice sunday!

Hari

Congratulations on finding that..

When you say wpSEO i assume you mean Yoast SEO? If so he recently changed the plugin to do real time page post analysis.

When updating a few old posts my back end was nearly brought to a crawl by his plugin analyzing my post content. I’m not impressed with the update.

Possibly deactivate wpSEO for the forum page. There is a post around here somewhere showing how to do that.

Regards, Ed

No I mean a german SEO tool wpSEO:

https://wpseo.de/