Louis Kessler’s Behold Blog

It’s been a frustrating week and decision time. I’ve tackled every problem along the way to get WordPress working the way I want it. But the one thing that kiboshes it all has happened. WordPress is too slow.

I didn’t expect this. As I developed it on my home computer, I was consistently getting 0.5 second response times. I had thought that the response time on the website was okay when I put version 2.3 up. But last week after I upgraded to 2.5, as I noted in this blog, I encountered intolerable response times. I’m talking about 5 seconds or more for a page to refresh.

I spent most of the week researching why. It is not the database accesses. Those are fast. Somehow, it appears to be slowed down by “include” and “include_once” statements in PHP. Every time a file is loaded, it takes about 0.1 seconds. Every page loads about a dozen files plus another 10 plugins for every call, whether the plugin is used or not. Even if I deactivate all my plugins, I cannot get response time less than 1.5 seconds. Already that minimum is only at the “bearable” level and there is no room for adding much of anything. Some plugins (especially my favorite Weather Icon) add up to 2 seconds of overhead.

Apparently this is an inherent problem with the way WordPress was developed and may never be solved. I’ve experimented with various sorts of Wordpress caches to speed things up. But these only work once a page has already been loaded. It’s almost worse to get some pages responding fast and others slow than to have them all slow.

This is all a factor of where the website is. I thought IXWebhosting’s shared Windows plans would give decent response. But it is 10 times slower than exactly the same Wordpress configuration on my own computer. I believe the only solution will ultimately to get a VPN (Virtual Private Network) or even a Dedicated Host to get better response. However, I’m not ready for that yet. When the traffic on my site starts to demands it, I’ll make that move.

So where do I go from here? I spent 5 months working to set all this up. It’s not all lost, as I learned a lot that is valuable to me. But I have not worked at all on Behold over that period. It’s time to change that. I’m going back to my old blog, my old forum, and I’ll just convert it over to my new site design. Then I can concentrate on Behold again which is what I should be doing.

Thanks everyone for your patience. I’m coming back on track.

Nothing at all new in this version. I had to get it up because all non-purchased versions expire today and require upgrading.

For the past two years, I have code-signed both the program and the install file. That ensures that the code has been untampered with since I created it so no third-party has added any bad stuff to it.

My code signing license ran out a few weeks ago, so I had to renew it. If you get one from VeriSign, it costs $499 per year. There are a few other companies, and the one I chose is Comodo who charge $180 per year.

But what I found out is that the Tucows Developers Network offers the Comodo digital certificate at $80 per year, or 3 years for $195. Obviously, this time I went for the latter choice. It is exactly the same certificate, but at 65% off!!

Now, personally that burned me. I felt ripped off that I had paid $180 last year when I could have paid $80. Why would any company let another company sell their product for that much less than they sell it themselves? Do they feel good about hiding the fact that you can buy their product for less elsewhere. Why when you’re purchasing from their site don’t they say: “Wait! You can save $$$ by not buying this from us. Go to …”

With Behold, I’ll never allow others to sell for less. I want you to always know that you’ve got the best deal available when you bought it, and you saved money by buying it before the price increases of future versions.

I had set up everything fine on my own computer, and the upgrade of WordPress from 2.3 to 2.5 seemed to go okay. Then I uploaded it to the live beholdgenealogy website and that’s when troubles started.

I fixed some things, but I’m leaving the blog in a bad state tonight (1:40 a.m., and I’ve got to get to bed). You can log in, but it redirects you to the wrong place. I can fix that, but it will take time.

But the worst thing is that the blog is now horribly slow. I’ve spent several hours trying to find the cause and search the web for fixes, but so far no luck. 2.5 is fast on my own computer, but not on the host. I don’t think it’s the host’s problem, but there is something not setup right that is causing the problem.

I’ll see what I can do.