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How To Make a SimplePress Forum run faster

by russjam
2 replies
  • WEB DESIGN
    • |
I have been using the Simple Press WordPress forum plugin for three months. On a good day it is slow; on a bad day it is excruciatingly slow.

My server has lots of memory and IO bandwidth so there are no hardware issues. The non-forum pages all run fast enough

I have switched off all the unused forum features as well as some moderately useful ones and the performance has improved only slightly.

My questions are:

1) How is it possible to make Simple Press run with acceptable performance?

2) If not, what other WordPress forum plugin is fully featured and performs acceptably?
#faster #forum #make #performance #run #simplepress
  • Profile picture of the author phpbbxpert
    You first need to find out what is causing it to be slow.

    Find out how many queries are running on page load/
    Add this to the footer
    <?php echo get_num_queries();?> queries. <?php timer_stop(1);?> seconds.

    That will output how many queries and how long it took to load.

    Check the tables in the database and make sure none of them are in a crash state or need optimizing.

    The next thing is to see how many requests are being made on page load.
    Use FireFox or Chrome browser with FireBug.
    On the page right click, Inspect Element and click on the Net or Network tab.
    Then reload the page.

    This will output in FireBug the number of http requests that are being made and the size & time to load.
    The lower the requests the better.

    From there you should at least have some kind of results to base what optimizations are needed.
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    • Profile picture of the author russjam
      Originally Posted by phpbbxpert View Post

      You first need to find out what is causing it to be slow.

      Find out how many queries are running on page load/
      Add this to the footer
      <?php echo get_num_queries();?> queries. <?php timer_stop(1);?> seconds.

      That will output how many queries and how long it took to load.

      Check the tables in the database and make sure none of them are in a crash state or need optimizing.

      The next thing is to see how many requests are being made on page load.
      Use FireFox or Chrome browser with FireBug.
      On the page right click, Inspect Element and click on the Net or Network tab.
      Then reload the page.

      This will output in FireBug the number of http requests that are being made and the size & time to load.
      The lower the requests the better.

      From there you should at least have some kind of results to base what optimizations are needed.
      Very many thanks for the feedback. The issue was the high number of image icons that the forum uses.

      I added the following lines to my.htaccess file to cache the images. The page load time has gone down from 30 seconds to 3 seconds.

      <IfModule mod_expires.c>
      ExpiresActive On
      ExpiresByType text/html "access plus 3 days"
      ExpiresByType text/css "access plus 7 days"
      ExpiresByType application/x-javascript "access plus 7 days"
      ExpiresByType image/png "access plus 30 days"
      ExpiresByType image/bmp "access plus 30 days"
      ExpiresByType image/gif "access plus 30 days"
      ExpiresByType image/x-icon "access plus 30 days"
      ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access plus 30 days"
      ExpiresByType image/jpg "access plus 30 days"
      </IfModule>

      The code was lifted from Chris Pearson's site pearsonified.com
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