Performance problem with first load

Question

I'm just trying to create my blog in WordPress hosted on my GoDaddy account (Windows Deluxe plan). WordPress is installed as subsite. When I check my blog after several hours of inactivity I have to wait more than 10 seconds before site opens. I checked it in Firebug and there is 10+ seconds delay between sending request and receiving response. I guess it has something to do with loading the application in IIS.

Unfortunatelly I haven't found any setting in GoDaddy's management console to keep the site running. How to deal with this problem? Is there any trick to register my site somewhere and let it regulary check my site?

I expect rare traffic to my blog so it would be pretty annoying for visitors to wait for each visit.

Edit:

This is not a problem of caching or too many plugins (my blog currently have one short post, one short page and All in one SEO plugin, nothing more). It is problem of slow response especially for the first call after long inactivity. Unfortunatelly Windows hosting does not offer Cron jobs. That is the reason why I'm looking for some additional service to regulary check my site.

But anyway GoDaddy looks like pretty bad choice. It was recommended to me and I liked the idea of Windows multi site hosting because I can host several apps there including .NET ones. The hosting itself and management tools look pretty good. But by simply checking the response I see that there is delay 1,5+ seconds for almost any request. If I access my test blog hosted directly at Wordpress the delay is 300ms.

Answer 1

Hi @Ladislav Mrnka:

It's a well-known problem among WordPress specialists that GoDaddy overloads their servers and you get tons of performance problems with it. If you are at GoDaddy because they are inexpensive let me recommend a host I've been using for years: A Small Orange. You can get a minimum account there for $US25/year, their Tiny plan.

The other solution is to set up a cron task or scheduled task to call your home page once per minute or maybe once every 5 minutes and that should keep it loading fast. Since I don't know exactly how GoDaddy works I'll give you some pages that should help you figure out how:

• What is a Cron Job?
• Schedule a task to call a webpage using Task scheduler
• How to set up cron job on godaddy? (for Drupal, but it's mostly the same)
• running drupal cron jobs on godaddy hosting
• How to emulate Cron Jobs on a Windows Server?

Answer 2

Uhm, not sure, but seems that it's a shared hosting with a shared mysql instance. Maybe you have database load problem.

Did you use some caching plugins for wordpress? They are a tremendous help, in solving this case of problem. Try W3 Total Cache and WP-Supercache. They help you mitigate the server load and minimize the load to the database, other that adding compression to js and css.

1. W3 Total Cache
2. WP Super Cache

Answer 3

The problem is with GoDaddy's slow network connections

There is nothing you can do about this accept find a new web host.

GoDaddy's servers are loaded with literally thousands of accounts per server and their databases servers are even more overloaded with limited bandwidth allocated between the servers and database servers.

If you want to keep tabs on average response times use Pingdom's free website monitoring tools.

Answer 4

I never looked into specifics, but I do know that after long periods inactivity first load comes with increased number (2x-3x) of database queries . Likely some semi-persistent data is getting recalculated and cached. Still 10s seems way too long even for that. It is hard to guess what might be taking so long without taking your specific installation apart and logging what is going on.

As band-aid alternative I can suggest caching plugin that performs pre-caching of results, such as already mentioned W3 Total Cache. That way first load would be triggered by code and performed in background so your visitors will be less likely to encounter that pause.