[wp-hackers] Slow loading WordPress (Problem found)

[Peter van der Does]

On Mon, 1 Dec 2008 21:48:15 -0500
Peter van der Does <peter at avirtualhome.com> wrote:

> I have friend who has a site that is extremely slow in loading, we
> tried WordPress 2.3.x 2.5.1, 2.6.5. The original site ran 2.3.1 when
> it became slow. The site ran fine for 3 weeks and became slow after
> writing a post, nothing out of the ordinary, same ole article as any
> other. Deleting the post didn't help. The site had about 60 posts.
> 
> What is slow, you ask, how about 20 secs to load index.php according
> to Firebug, no plugins, default theme. Here's the weird thing, the
> plugin wp-spamfree loads a file called wpsf-js.php. This file also
> takes 20 secs to loads.
> 
> On the site is also phpBB installed and there are no speed problems
> with it, neither with a php file that was uploaded to show the
> phpinfo().
> 
> Does anybody have any clue what to look for?
> 
> Things we have done so far but didn't help
> 1. Optimized tables.
> 2. Dropped all tables and imported them again.
> 3. Upgraded to 2.6.5
> 
> The site: http://1vibe.net
> forum: http://1vibe.net/forum
> 
I wasn't joking and I found a work around just before Jerry went to
check.

The server has a problem doing a DNS lookup of itself. This causes a
problem for wp-cron execution. When a page loads WordPress tries to
call wp-cron.php, it uses fsockopen and tries to resolve the servers
address. After a 20 sec timeout it fails and continues with the page
building.

The work around:
In wp-cron.php comment out:
if ( $_GET['check'] != wp_hash('187425') )
	exit;

Manually call wp-cron.php : http://example.com/wp-cron.php
Sometimes you have to do it twice, I don't know why.

The real solution is to contact the provider and have them setup a DNS
where the server can resolve itself.

-- 
Peter van der Does

GPG key: E77E8E98

WordPress Plugin Developer
http://blog.avirtualhome.com

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