Calendar Response Time (long Time to First Byte)

[tammylfinch]

We are having significant response time issues with the site in general (our problem) and with the Events Pro plug-in (a shared problem). The main Events page (artspartners.net/events) is very slow, generally showing an average 3.87 seconds Time To First Byte with the default 3 events per day. Our users prefer to see all events, but changing the events per day to 30 increases TTFB to 11.4 seconds. Obviously, both times are unacceptable and especially first time visitors won’t wait around – or come back.

As mentioned in the support forum, I have added the allow large joins code snippet to our functions.php file but I haven’t noticed any difference.

[Julie Kuehl]

Hey tammylfinch,

I just wanted to let you know that I’m going to have Barry help you with this since you worked with him previously. He’s out today, however, but I’m sure he’ll get in touch with you shortly.

– Julie

[Barry]

Hi tammylfinch,

Unfortunately I don’t think the large joins snippet is going to help here – by the sounds of things and based on the last thread where we looked at response times everything is working correctly, albeit slowly, and so there is no need to raise that particular limit.

I definitely appreciate your frustration here – slow load times are never enjoyable – but as covered before you do have a large number of events and what looks to be a particularly high ratio of recurring events.

With that in mind, were you able to implement any of the caching options we discussed previously such as query caching?

[tammylfinch]

These times are with the W3 Total Cache enabled. I did turn off page caching since it was latching on to old pages and not updating. Database and object caching was turned on. I’ve also disabled all non-essential plug-ins.

My goal is to get the main Events page down to 1 second or less Time to First Byte. Currently, even with the default max 3 events per day, we have a ways to go. I’ve done enough testing to validate that the Events Calendar creates a significant TTFB delay. We are continuing to add events to the calendar, so I expect the challenge to become greater with time.

[Barry]

OK: I’m afraid that, right now, there’s not much else we can do here in the short term.

It’s a shame you can’t set up caching for the generated HTML output, but certainly if it was causing problems I can imagine it would be preferable to live without it. We are continually changing and improving the codebase so I’d like to think you will see things improve as new versions arrive – but speeding things up further at this moment in time is something you’re realistically going to have to drive forward yourself with regards to your own site.

Sorry we can’t offer more on this occasion.

[Author]

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