WordPress Azure – Long Wait on first request

  • Resolved Zabelator

    (@zabelator)


    12 years ago

    I have a wordpress site running at https://www.ZebraHealth.com. The site is up and running OK, but has a much slower load time than expected.

    It is hosted on Windows Azure West Coast. This is our first hosted site, as we usually host on our own, but with a BizSpark account, Azure was something we wanted to try out.

    After getting it all set up, and installing the caching plugins, and everything else, the site still loads REALLY slow. I have a second site, we host, that is set-up basically the same (same caching plugins, we host, has a different theme) that loads in half the time.

    https://www.zebrahealth.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/AzureSlow.png
    Using the Pingdom website speed search, shown in link above, I see this long 2.5 or longer wait during the first request. Anyone have any idea what may be causing this?

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
  • esmi

    (@esmi)

    12 years ago

    It could be the server itself. Any change if you use the default Twenty Fourteen theme with all plugins deactivated?

    Any chance you try a test install on a completely different server?

    Thread Starter Zabelator

    (@zabelator)

    12 years ago

    We are setting up a test environment to host it as we speak, I should be able to see how the site reacts to that on Monday. I’m worried it will be faster when we host it, and slow back at Azure, and Ill be right back where I started.

    As for changing the theme and plugins, I will give that a shot this evening when we have less traffic on the site.

    Thanks for the ideas.

    Thread Starter Zabelator

    (@zabelator)

    11 years, 12 months ago

    So changing the theme and plugins didnt make any difference.

    We have set up a test environment, running on our own web server. Tested it with the Pingdom tool. Hosted by us it had 44 millisecond wait on first request. Thats lightning fast compared to the 3.5 seconds we see from the same site hosted by Azure.

    https://www.zebrahealth.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/AzureSlow2.png

    • Newest version of wordpress
    • Basic Coller Theme

    Hosted at Azure:

    • Azure Website, running WordPress
    • Azure Storage for MySQL
    • 2 Cloud Apps and storage
    • ARR setup and directing requests

    Even when we skip the ARR and hit the direct link for the AzureWebsite, we still have the long wait on the first request. It’s starting to look like hosting it on our own may just be the easiest fix.

    Our experience with Azure/BizSpark has been “Here is a bunch of free stuff, that you can get started with, but when you get people on your site, be prepared to pay for reliability.”

    Thread Starter Zabelator

    (@zabelator)

    11 years, 11 months ago

    I have made vast improvements to the speed of the site. Although I was way off on the cause.. IF I even did find the root cause of it.

    We were running W3 Total Cache, From articles and posts, it seemed to work well for people.

    As soon as I turned off W3 Total Cache the site sped up. I added WP Super Cache and Autoptimize plugins, and it sped up even more.

    My guess is that I did not have W3 Total Cache set up properly. WP Super Cache was far simpler to set up. Autoptimize gave me the HTML and CSS minification I thought I was losing when I removed W3 Total Cache.

    I now get my site to load in under 2 seconds every time, and under 1 second when the test ping is closer to us.

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)

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