I don’t really look at server response times too much, because gen­er­ally it’s a bit dull, really.  If our server is really sick then the auto­matic alerts and text mes­sages from Ping­dom tell me to get fixing.

Any­way, tonight I just thought I’d have a look at some graphs.  And hey, there’s a bit of a shock… my own site, this one here, is get­ting slower.  Here’s the graph:

Now, what you’ll notice is that gen­er­ally everything looked nice and brisk until early August 2009 when there was a marked deteri­or­a­tion in per­form­ance.  Then it plod­ded along just fine until Decem­ber 2009 when it got worse again.

Is It Word­Press Bloat?

I wondered what had happened to cause this — I’m espe­cially shocked that a page load is now so slow.  I haven’t changed the theme in use for at least a year, and the plu­gins are gen­er­ally ones I use else­where.  So I did a bit of think­ing, and then it dawned on me when I found this list of release dates at WordPress.org:

The dates cor­rel­ate exactly with the worsen­ing per­form­ance of this site.

Now, cor­rel­a­tion abso­lutely does not relate to caus­al­ity.  At upgrade time I usu­ally take a moment to review plu­gins, upgrade the theme, etc.  It could be that an upgrade or change to one of the many plu­gins in use here that has caused the slow­down.  I know it’s not traffic to my site — that’s been flat for ages, with only the occa­sional blip.  The server is a ded­ic­ated machine run­ning about fourty sites that we man­age, but the load is gen­er­ally quite con­sist­ent and impact on dif­fer­ent web­sites is fairly well managed.

But I’m a speed freak.  I like it when a web­site zings into view.  I love fast cars.  I love com­puters that don’t dither.  I love tele­phones that respond instantly.  So I hate that response times are now below 1s.  That’s not on!

So I’m going to try to find the cause of this slow­down — I’ll be run­ning some exper­i­ments on this site, pro­fil­ing quer­ies, check­ing the data­base over and so on.  And I’ll doc­u­ment it all as a way of show­ing you how we at Inter­con­nect IT do our per­form­ance tun­ing.  Whether I doc­u­ment it here or there I haven’t decided yet — I think it would make a good case study for the site.  We’ll see!  Watch both sites…

note 1 — deac­tiv­ated Twitme on 03/02/2010

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