Wordpress site is sloooow, but admin is fast…any ideas?

Question

I have a Linode VPS running a single Wordpress blog. It has been running just fine until today. The admin panel is snappy, but the site is very slow. I am still finishing the site, so there shouldn't be any traffic.

When I go to mydomain.com it takes 45+ seconds to load, then each click on the link takes about the same amount of time. I didn't update any WP plugins (or WP), but I did add a google analytics plugin a week ago, but seemed fine. I disabled that and no difference either.

I tried rebooting nginx, and then rebooted the whole machine... still slow. My "free -m" output is:

 user@myserver~ $ free -m
         total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
 Mem:     469        147        321          0          3         45
 -/+ buffers/cache:   98        370
 Swap:    511          0        511

The weird part is nothing has changed in the last few days....Any ideas?

Answer 1

Not much information to go on... Start with elimination - disable the plugins, switch to default (or better - blank) theme. If it gets better - just find code at fault. If you are down to the bare and clean WP core and still having the issue - likely you have some server configuration issue.

Since you have considerable control over server you can also hook up some PHP profiler and try to make a dump of what is going on.