I am running a VPS with multiple wordpress installations on it. When I access my website, the first request that the browser performs is a GET request that takes about 10 seconds to complete, then the css, js files and so on start to be downloaded as fast as one could expect. That slows down my website a lot.
I am running apache2 and php5 with default configurations, plus the following plugins in use:
- WordPress ZenCache.
- php’s APC cache.
- mod_deflate.
The websites are just landing pages with minimal templates, nothing huge. When pages are cached, the previous time can be improved up to 2 or 3 seconds as much.
I understand that many wrong things could make this happen, but could anyone expert devise a possible starting point to fix?
By the way, I had to set up some aliases and redirections with mod_alias and mod_rewrite, I would like to know if that may cause this behaviuor as well.
After following Andrew’s advice, I disabled the default reverse DNS lookups in my virtual hosts configuration file by adding the option
In addition, I disabled the use of symlinks when possible with
And disabled the logs as well. Now the problem has been solved and everything works much faster now. It was not directly related to WordPress since a simple html landing page was also suffering from this latency.