Entire site and admin panel is SOOOOOO SLOW!!

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Hi everyone, I'm testing out concrete5 for a site and after installing it, it's been uber slow. I'm talking about over a min page load times. And the odd thing is that when the pages do eventually load, the resulting page is displaying information that I don't have specified in the page layout. And sometimes it goes directly to editing mode. I'm not sure what's going on here.

I've read a lot of posts about slow performance, and I've tried both the jquery and zend tips, and nothing has helped!

Here's the test site,http://www.caribbeanedge.com/facebook/concrete5....

I'm not that technical (which is why concrete5 seemed like a good option to begin with since it's very user friendly), so any help would be appreciated!!

Thanks!

 
JimboJetset replied on at Permalink Reply
JimboJetset
Have you tried following these instructions by Andrew who is one of the C5 Core Team...

http://andrewembler.com/web/improving-the-performance-of-zend-cache...
smilenstacy replied on at Permalink Reply
Thanks JimboJetset. I already tried that and didn't notice a difference... =(
andrew replied on at Permalink Reply
andrew
Yeah, unfortunately I think if you're talking about performance that is THAT slow, those tips really aren't going to make a noticeable difference. I would also second a vote to look at the hosting company. Sounds like resources on that server are very constrained/locked down.

What's the web host?
JimboJetset replied on at Permalink Reply
JimboJetset
OK... it may be worth posting which company is hosting the site and maybe a phpinfo link as well so people have as much info as possible to help you.
smilenstacy replied on at Permalink Reply
The site is hosted through Media Temple. I don't have full access to the hosting service. The guy who maintains it gave me access to a directory so I can test out concrete5 for a new site my client's trying to build to see if it would be a good fit.

What's the phpinfo link and how do I access it?
mario replied on at Permalink Reply
mario
Is it Grid Service (gs) or Virtual Dedicated (dv)? Grid Service can slow down intermittently or even fail to load. ten minutes later everything is fine. I don't recommend their GS. Dedicated is better.
smilenstacy replied on at Permalink Reply
mario replied on at Permalink Reply
mario
btw, it's not a great idea to post your phpinfo file on a public forum. maybe have it up quick and then delete it as soon as possible... or just forward it to jimbo.
smilenstacy replied on at Permalink Reply
Thanks for the tip Mario. I'll take the link down in a bit.

Not sure if it's GS or dedicated. I'll have to check with the guy who set up the hosting. But that's good to know.
andrew replied on at Permalink Reply
andrew
Having formerly hosted with Mediatemple, I'd wager 99% that this is grid server (rather than dedicated or virtual dedicated, which has always been fast in my experience.).

Here's something else to try: if you login to the dashboard, and go into "sitewide settings > debug", can you DISABLE the cache? I remember when I was having slowness w/mediatemple this actually made a difference, because their grid filesystem was so slow that the cache, which should usually speed things up, was actually slowing things down because it relies so much on the filesystem. Not really sure why but that helped in my experience.
michaelpierce replied on at Permalink Reply
look forward to following this thread as I've just installed concrete for the first time on mediatemple gs and it is painfully slow, around 15-40sec loadtime
smilenstacy replied on at Permalink Reply
Andrew, I tried disabling the cache and it didn't make a difference.

Is the Mediatemple gs performance issue only with concrete5 or with other CMS's too? I've been told by the site admin that they have WordPress and another CMS installed that don't have the same slow page loading issues.
michaelpierce replied on at Permalink Reply
I know for me its only Concrete, I have wordpress, indexibit, vanilla, and many other services on other sites on the same cluster. Concrete5 is the only one that has such slow performance
mario replied on at Permalink Reply
mario
that might be the case sometimes. however, in our experience over the last year and a half it's been MT's (gs) because they very often actually state they're having problems and downtime with cluster availability on their server status page. With that said, their Customer Service is excellent and pretty knowledgeable.

We've moved all of our sites that matter over to DV.
michaelpierce replied on at Permalink Reply
Anyone have any other thoughts I'm curious if it has to do with how this code interacts with the cluster since it really does seem like its only concretecms
bazookadaver replied on at Permalink Reply
I too am having the same problem. Removing cache helped a little, but it is still super slow.

I am on Media Temple Grid server on cluster 1. Wordpress and other sites that I have on there run fine.
thephilm replied on at Permalink Reply
thephilm
@BazookaDave - Maybe you should try Dreamhost? IM me at work tomorrow and we'll get you setup!
smilenstacy replied on at Permalink Reply
I tried installing Joomla on the MediaTemple grid server just to test it out to see if I would run into the same performance issues and it seems to be working fine.

I'm really confused as to why only concrete5 is affected. And is this with any hosting service that uses grid servers or only MediaTemple?

I really like concrete's features but since switching hosting isn't really an option, I don't see how I can continue using it....
nteaviation replied on at Permalink Reply
nteaviation
What version of c5 are your using? Perhaps trying a different version would shed soome light on the subject. Perferably testing 5.3.x vs 5.4.x If other CMS are not having the "SO SLOW" issue, it kind of leads one to believe it is not a resource issue.
mario replied on at Permalink Reply
mario
could you list the add-ons you're running, if any and theme type? Have you customized any of them? It could be that there's some wacky javascript or db calls being made on the site which are eating up resources.

EDIT: I just surfed your old URL and yes, things are definitely abnormal even for MT shared hosting. I see that you're running the default theme, although what is interesting is that performance is a bit inconsistent. Sometimes a few pages load quickly and others take a minute or two. I will let you know that our C5 sites ran pretty normally in general even on MT shared hosting so something funky is going on.
nteaviation replied on at Permalink Reply
nteaviation
Interesting. I have noticed that some times running SWF kills performance. Are the pages that are running slow using the default SWF gallery addon?
Plaz replied on at Permalink Reply
Hi,
I'm thinking about hosting some concrete5 sites on Mediatemple... and I ran across your post. Did MT end up working out for you?
Thanks in advance
bryanlewis replied on at Permalink Reply
bryanlewis
I highly recommend NOT going with MediaTemple. Sites load slow because of the virtual hosting.
myFullFlavour replied on at Permalink Reply
myFullFlavour
Another vote AGAINST MediaTemple.
Deladroid replied on at Permalink Reply
Deladroid
I'm using a GoDaddy Virtual Server (Windows 2008) and am also experiencing very slow load times (usually in Edit mode) and sometimes it will say it's in Edit mode, when it's not and I'll have to exit edit mode and go back for the page to actually be in edit mode.

I also experienced this with the previous C5 version, and the sites were on a DiscountASP.Net shared setup, so I thought it was that.
frz replied on at Permalink Reply
frz
it sounds like you keep picking windows based webhosts.

stop that.


pick one from the top of our hosting page, and enjoy:

http://concrete5.org/hosting
Deladroid replied on at Permalink Reply
Deladroid
Good point. However I figured (maybe I'm not informed enough) that the PHP support in IIS for Windows allows a PHP to run much the same as on Linux? Is there an advantage to using Linux based server??
frz replied on at Permalink Reply
frz
PHP was never designed to run on windows. It can, for development, but I'd never recommend that for a live situation. Apache + PHP = happy

Best wishes,
(Pecked out on a mobile device...)
http://about.me/frz
Deladroid replied on at Permalink Reply
Deladroid
I'll keep moving to Apache in mind. Maybe the pre-install check C5 does, could say "Hey, this is Windows! Don't use Windows.". :-p
Ale replied on at Permalink Reply
I wouldn't say that Windows based hosting itself is the real problem. Our company is running dozens of _live_ Concrete5 sites (varying from 5.1 to 5.5.2.1) on IIS servers. Older servers running IIS6 required some special configuration, but nothing too complicated. Newer ones ( >= 7) run just fine with extensions like memcached and WinCache or url rewriting. We also have experience on running Concrete5 sites in a IIS web farm consisting of a load balancer and multiple servers "behind" it. Also, each site can be run in it's own application pool with it's own limited resources to prevent whole server from slowing down because of one site.

Nevertheless I'm not saying that IIS should be considered necessarily better than a LAMP stack, but I just wanted to note that it can be successfully used for C5 hosting. Nothing wrong with LAMP, we have been using that also and it has it's own advantages.

I think the biggest problem on some hosting providers is the limited file IO. If I recall correctly, when the server finds file IO too slow, it queues file calls to RAM and eventually will run very low on free RAM and thats where the "crawling" starts. Adding more RAM will ease the problem to an extext, but not solve it completely. It will interesting to see how Concrete 5.6's new override cache will affect file IO limited hosts/sites.
Remo replied on at Permalink Reply
Remo
I do have some concrete5 sites running on IIS. They run perfectly fine but I had some issues when hosters used CGI which is obviously slower. It's certainly not a problem of Windows in general but concrete5 does more requirements than a static HTML site...
mhawke replied on at Permalink Reply
mhawke
When I started working with C5 a few months ago, I originally went with GoDaddy but I bailed out after a while. It was agonizingly slow. I think the plumbing back and forth to their database servers is the problem but I'm too much of a noob to diagnose server issues. I went with TMD Hosting and I'm very happy with the speed. It's faster than my localhost setup! My GoDaddy account sits idle. I guess they spent all their server money paying Danica.

Franz, have a look at TMD. Perhaps they could get on your list of recommended hosts.
robgevers replied on at Permalink Reply
you might like to check my post about windows(iis) hosting and c5 and performance boost :

http://www.concrete5.org/community/forums/chat/speed-up-your-conenc...