Hi
I use 1click install of WordPress on Dreamhost shared hosting. My site http://www.robotguide.com/ has been running increasingly slowly for a few months, both the site and the admin backend, it was taking about 5 seconds to load either. I contacted their support twice and was told everything was normal. It's only a small site and I don't get too many visitors so far. Less now!
I upgraded to WordPress 3.6 and 3.6.1 the other day and both the site and admin take a minimum of 15-20 seconds to load any page! I have wasted nearly 3 days trying to find out why and as you can imagine having to wait 15 or 20 seconds everytime I change something to test is really frustrating, never mind lost work and site users!
Verification of results:
- connected through a UK VPN to check from a different location, still slow.
- used a variety of browsers, slow.
- other people also reporting site as slow.
- http://bytecheck.com/ reports 15-20s for first byte
- http://tools.pingdom.com/ typically 17s to laod site
- website inspector reports 20s for the network request and then a few seconds to render the page
- connecting to http://www.robotguide.com/readme.html is near instant, so it's something to do with WordPress and the Dreamhost servers I thing!
What I have tried:
- disabled all plugins, still 15-20s
- deleted all plugins, no effect
- followed all the dreamhost faqs on their site inc database optimisation, checking memory and checking database load times, no effect
- optimised the database. no effect
- deleted the whole site and did a clean install of wordpress, even with a clean install and an 'empty' database the site and admin were still about 10seconds
- using a cache plugin like W3 total cache speeds up site loading, but working in the admin is still awful.
- created a site on another host and imported my site, and it loaded in a few seconds!
- hours of googling and trying stuff.
In essence the site seems to render quickly once it starts, but takes 15-20seconds to get to that point. As the site loads quickly on another host it seems to be something Dreamhost are doing.
I don't really want to move to another host, but this is intolerable. I've posted on their support but thought I would ask here too given the last two times I have asked for help with this issue on Dreamhost support have not been useful!
Any ideas or similar experience?
Thanks in advance, Mike
