I develop wordpress sites for a living, and today I am experiencing something that I haven’t yet come across: Extremely slow load times / latency problems. You can view the site here: http://ziprecords.com.previewdns.com/ Here are the steps I took:
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Developed a theme on localhost, everything worked perfectly.
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Exported data from within wordpress backend
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Opened up Godaddy account and set up new shared hosting account, and installed WordPress using their self-installer. I am testing this site using their ‘preview DNS’, which enables you to view the site live before connecting a domain. Godaddy assured me, this works fine with WP installs.
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I then attempted to import the data from the local install. There was errors on the media uploads (failed to import media).
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I manually uploaded media files, and relinked the pictures to all my posts (from this point on, I knew something was fishy)
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I went to my local phpMyAdmin and exported the entire database in SQL. (keep in mind, I am using a plugin called shopp, which powers the ecommerce section of the site. These tables were included in the export)
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In a text editor, I replaced all of the local host references to the new domain URL.
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I went to my Godaddy phpMyAdmin and dropped all of the pre-existing wordpress tables. I then imported the SQL database.
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I then went to the site and looked at it. It was pretty darn slow.
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It seemed like as I entered more products into the shop and more content on the site, it became slower and slower, but perhaps that is a coincidental. I am experiencing some SEVERE latency/speed problems.
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I called Godaddy, and after some tests, they said everything is fine on their end.
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I then tried testing this out on ANOTHER server using the exact sames steps as above. When I tried uploading the XML backup, EVERYTHING failed to import, even post types and post content. When I tried importing the SQL, everything works fine. The new site is working as I wish as far as speed, however, all of the content is completely missing, due to the failed import.
So now I am stuck in a situation where I am unable to target the cause of this problem, and I don’t have a working test environment because the WordPress import fails every time.
The latency problems could be on Godaddys end; however, I am sure that something is screwed on on the WP DB, as indicated by the failed media imports/ exports, as well as the extremely slow latency.
Any ideas?
There are two problems that I can think of right now that you might want to check.
First, if the app is running quickly with no data in the tables, or very little data, then that would mean connection and data transfer latencies are not the issues, meaning that there are not some kind of odd network problems in the background. To make sure that this isn’t causing some kind of issue, run a trace route, and perhaps even post it here, from your web server to the database server, to make sure that something there isn’t funny.
The other possibility is that your import did not properly build indexes. Check to make sure that indexes exist on all primary keys, etc, or double check against a regularly built database and make sure that they share indexes.
To make sure that indexes are proper, you can let wordpress build the database for you, and instead of dropping everything and building from the mysqldump file as is, just go through and remove all of the ‘create’ statements from the mysqldump file and try to run it, pushing the data directly into the tables created by wordpress instead.