site speed turning into a crawl

[tox]

Hi Jason, this is Piet again on Torkel’s behalf, we spoke earlier this month (http://support.themeblvd.com/forums/topic/custom-homepage-layouts/#post-2454), how are you doing?

Yesterday Torkel’s site went live and as he had done quite some PR in the weeks before, the site was hit by a floodwave of people. In total he received almost 8,000 pageviews yesterday alone!

During this premiere day Torkel has had quite some trouble keeping his site online, it returned 503 errors and the speed of the pageloads was lacking.

Do you know or can you tell me whether there is anything in your theme that can cause slowness when the site is hit my hundreds of people at the same time? Have you heard of this before or should we search for the cause of this elsewhere (hosting)?

Thanks in advance for your response.

Warmest regards,
Piet

Topic

[Jason Bobich]

Hello Piet,

There are just so many factors at play here.

My theme is going to be more load intensive than themes that don’t give you all of these kinds of features, and WPML is in itself is very load intensive (one of it’s biggest criticisms out there for how great it is).

If you’re not using any caching, that is definitely something you want to do. You can use a plugin like W3 Total Cache paired with a CDN service like S3 Amazon.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/w3-total-cache/

http://aws.amazon.com/s3/

But honestly the most important factor is probably going to be your server. I don’t know what your setup is there. But if you’re getting all of this traffic, realistically you better not have some kind of cheap, shared hosting account. It might be a good idea to talk to your hosting company and possibly assess the traffic you’re getting and what kinds of dedicated or VPS plans they might be able to upgrade you to based on your situation.

[tox]

Thanks for your response, Jason.
I already turned on Supercache and that is helping a bit. Thanks for adding that your theme is more load intensive, that together with WPML may indeed be the cause of some of the slowness. But it should obviously not lead to an unreachable site, so will turn to the host instead.
Thanks again for your support,
Piet

[Author]

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