Neil Crookes

Learnings and Teachings on Web Application Development & CakePHP

Jul

WordPress rating plugin performance issue

I noticed pages on my blog were loading a bit slowly, make that ridiculously slowly, sometimes 25 seconds or more. I know my dedicated server is pretty old and low tech now, but 25 seconds! That’s crazy. So I decided to dig around and find out why.

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Using the Net tab in Firebug I checked out the requests that were taking so long to load. It turns out it was just one of them – a request for a js file used by a WordPress Plugin I’d installed for rating my posts, called WP-PostRatings.

It’s quite a nice bit of functionality to have on the site, with an ajax rating mechanism and decent logging data available in the control panel, but not worth waiting 25 seconds for, so I’ve de-activated it.

One of my pages took 25.43 seconds to load according to Firebug’s Net tab with the WP-PostRatings plugin activated and 3.98 seconds with it de-activated.