For the last couple of weeks I’ve noticed that Irreal has been loading slowly. Irreal, like many small WordPress blogs, runs on a virtual server and I assumed that my hosting provider was moving things around a bit and that the problem would resolve itself soon.
Then Jean-Philippe Paradis noticed that although the blog was slow to load, he could connect to irreal.org instantly. By using the Safari Timeline Recording function I can see that the problem is a ~22 second latency before the front page starts to load. Once the load starts it completes in about 300 ms. It does not appear that plugin loading or running is an issue. I did a Web search for the problem but didn’t find much. I did notice that one entry on the WordPress Forum claimed that things speeded up after the site was pinged. I tried that and sure enough the site started loading quickly again.
Rule 2 states, “There is no magic” so I’m not really believing in the magical power of ping. Because the problems started around the same time as the automatic WordPress udgrade to 3.7.1, I reloaded the update by hand. As things stand now, the site is loading normally for me.
If you find that the site is still loading slowly for you, could you please leave a comment to this post? Also, as I’ve said before, I’m really a back end guy and don’t know much about PHP or Web servers so if you have any wisdom to impart please leave a comment about that too. Thanks.