Update on WPI Performance Plugin
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Firstly – hi to all our new users. I see Stefan from Datafeedr posted out a nice email telling you all about my WPI Performance Plugin. That’s great and I’m happy to have you on board.
Some issues are coming up though with the various set ups you have. Here’s what I’m aware of so far:
- If you don’t have WooCommerce installed, it breaks – this will be fixed today. I’m sorry this happened – it was in the last update. It won’t happen again.
- Some users are not seeing the promised performance benefits – if this is you, please submit a question here: https://www.wpintense.com/new-question/ Include a link to your slowest page so I have somewhere to focus my efforts and I’ll figure out why you are not getting the performance I promised and I’ll analyse so I can implement a fix. Add [email protected] as admin so I can install Query Monitor and review the performance. Other than installing Query Monitor, I will not make any changes directly on your site – i.e. I will only use your site to analyse performance and figure out where the slow performance is coming from – I will then develop a solution in my own development environment. If you wish, you can install Query Monitor yourself and send me a full page screenshot of your slowest page after you have clicked on the ‘Slow Queries’ link in the admin bar for Query Monitor.
To answer some common questions:
- This plugin is NOT just for WooCommerce (despite the current breakage for non-WooCommerce installs)
- You *shouldn’t* need to configure anything other than installing the plugin, although if you’re using WooCommerce, you do need to switch widgets to get full performance benefit
- It includes optimisations for datafeedr imports, wp all import, custom post types and more are being added weekly. As I uncover and fix slow performance from various plugins, I will add those fixes to the plugin. So, if you have slow performance even after installing the WPI plugin – please let me help you and together we can make WordPress the fastest platform on the planet.
Coming very soon
Prior to Stefan’s email going out last night, I was close to finishing another upgrade for the WPI performance plugin. FYI – in one of my development environments, I have 820,000 products. With the currently live version of the WPI Perf plugin, the slowest page on there uncached loads in 12 seconds (compared to minutes with vanilla WooCommerce). I personally think 12 seconds is abysmal. Anyway, the updated development version is sub-second, I just need to iron out some bugs before it’s released.
I’m hoping to have this update out today and if not today then tomorrow at the latest.
Coming later
I’m also optimising the free text search of WordPress and WooCommerce. If you’re not aware, under the hood WordPress by default uses literally the worst technique for doing text search (the LIKE operator). Both MyISAM and InnoDB now offer full text indexes, so there’s no good reason for this situation to continue. The LIKE operator is really slow – it cannot use an index at all – and it produces poor results as it has no comprehension of relevance. Anyway – first things first – happy to have you all on board – update coming out today with fix for non-WooCommerce users and hopefully later tonight with further performance boost.
August 16, 2016 @ 2:21 am
Id like to see the search performance fixes. I am getting very slow searches with woo commerce currently
August 18, 2016 @ 12:07 pm
They are coming – I have a search upgrade in development which provides normal search as well as a cool new widget which gives lightning fast Ajax search – i.e. you type in the box and the most relevant answers appear in a little dropdown below with image and title & description & optionally price. Bear with me while I iron out the remaining items in this and get it into the WPI plugin.
August 16, 2016 @ 11:31 am
Hi My site breaks when I activate the plugin with
HTTP ERROR 500
August 18, 2016 @ 12:06 pm
Hi – I think I helped you through email? Fixed in v2.71 (was breaking non-woocommerce sites)
August 19, 2016 @ 4:25 pm
If you are activating the latest version of the plugin and you get an HTTP ERROR 500 (generic server error), please refresh the page a few times until it clears. i.e. keep activating the plugin until all the indexes are created.
Alternatively, modify your php.ini max_execution_time and your nginx fast_cgi_read_timeout values to allow longer script execution.
There are about 10 indexes that get created, they can take some time, but once each one has been created it doesn’t need to be made again – that’s why if you keep trying to activate it with a really low timeout setting, the database will get the command to build the index and eventually all indexes will be built and it will activate.
August 29, 2016 @ 7:33 am
My sorting options on my woovommerce site cartgrabber.com are not working with the plugin activated.
August 29, 2016 @ 12:53 pm
From the options page, there is an ordering option. If you choose to remove the ability to have custom sorting from the options, you will get a speed boost (particularly if you also remove the product counts) but it does remove the functionality to adjust sorting – i.e. it uses the default sort order on the table.
This is under the WP_Query options in the WPI perf settings page.