Event Calendar TTFB

[Thomas]

Hello,

I recently opened a ticket, but thought the issue was resolved so I closed it. I’d like to re open the discussion. I’v pasted the details below for your convenience.

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https://theeventscalendar.com/support/forums/topic/event-calendar-ttfb/#post-1196727

We’ve begun an initiative to troubleshoot performance issues on a client site. They currently have the following Modern Tribe Plugins installed:

Event Calendar 4.3.3
Event Calendar Pro 4.3.3
Community Events 4.3.1
Filter Bar 4.3.3
Event Ticket 4.3.3
Event Ticket Plus 4.3.3

With all other plugins disabled, we see performance degredation in our TTFB between 1 and 2.5 sec when Modern Tribe’s plugins are enabled. This degredation is seen at the same amount when all other plugins are enabled as well.

I’ve attached two print screens; 1 showing the timeline with the Modern Tribe plugins enabled and one with them disabled. I am performing the test on the home page with Google Chromes Network Dev Tools.. You will see the change in TTFB within the print screens.

Since the degredation appears regardless of the other miscellaneous plugins, the issue does not appear to be the result of a plugin conflict.

The provided URL is a development version of the website.
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The TTFB was under 1 second when we closed the above ticket however, today it was back over 4 seconds. I disabled and enabled the Modern Tribe plugins and it dropped back below 1 second. It is currently under 1 second. What would cause this and how can we go about troubleshooting this? Print screens from the prior ticket are still accurate.

Additionally, since dev.coloradoblackhealth.org is a development site, we can troubleshoot however necessary.

Thank you.

Tom D.

[Brook]

Howdy Thomas,

Thank you for reaching out, I would love to help you find a solution for this. I am one of the performance nuts on our team, it’s a big passion of mine.

Thanks for all of the information you have shared. I have reviewed your site and I am not finding anything super anomalous about it. Fixable performance issues typically boil down to odd settings or giant post databases. But your site seems to be well configured.

A one second TTFB is very good. For WordPress hosts I often see 3+ seconds, and DreamHost is just over 3 seconds on average. Are you on on the DreamPress hosting plan perchance? It sounds to me like your issue is likely related to being on a shared server. When one or more other websites on your server is seeing a lot of traffic, your load time increases. That would explain the fluctuations in your load times. You were saying that even with all plugins enabled you saw a ~1 second load time, but that it has fluctuated to 4 now. When browsing your site I saw it vary from 2 to 8 seconds.

One thing that might help speed your site up a bit is to cleanup any old post revisions and empty the trash. The WP Optimize plugin can help you do this with ease. This might trim the size of your post database by a noticeable amount. The smaller your post database is the faster your site will be.

What is your end goal here? Are you trying to get consistent 1 second page loads? If so sadly I think the only thing you can do is get a dedicated host like a VPS. This will basically give you  your own server, so that no other website on the same server can’t slow you down when they are under load.

Or did you just want to know why enabling calendar plugins is causing slowness? Due to how WordPress works post meta date searches are incredibly slow. So any calendar built according to WordPress best practice will have a huge performance handicap. This is just an unfortunate side effect of WordPress’ flexibility. Because of that we have to work very hard to make our plugins as fast as possible, and we do. We run regular performance audits in a wide variety of situations. Anytime we find an area we are ripe for improvement we’ll release an update for it. And while there are a few things our last audit found, none of them seem applicable to your configuration. You have already configured your site nicely when it comes to performance.

Does that all make sense? Does it help answer your questions?

Cheers!

– Brook

[Thomas]

Thank you for your reply. That last paragprah was very informative.

We’re using a Dreamhost VPS with a dedicated IP. We have other sites on the VPS however, their resource utilization is really low. I’ve attached a print screen of the resource details.

The variation in TTFB has been pretty consistent for me ranging between 1 – 4 seconds. Right now it is under 1 second. Once it gets up to 4 seconds it seems to stay that way. I’m not sure if this is a standard peak and valley trend or not. I do know that the TTFB dropped back to below 1 second after I disabled and re enabled the event calendar plugins. I was not sure why that had any effect.

I actually ran WP Optimize before I opened the ticket. Apparently there wasn’t much DB overhead to clean up.
We would love a 1 second load time for visitors in Colorado USA , but we know it may be difficult due to the woocommerce plugins (Pingdom report). I know we need to crawl before we can run and right now we want to be sure we have TTFB that is consistently ~1 second.

I suppose we would like to know if the changes in TTFB are a result of the plugins or the server.

[Brook]

That’s excellent. Based on what I was seeing on your site it comes as little surprise that you have already run WP Optimize and are on a VPS.

Since you are on a VPS one thing you might do is disable WP cron and scheduling an actual cron script to replace it. If your VPS runs Cpanel or Plesk, you probably have a cron utility that can help with scheduling it. This can remove some of the variation on page load speeds, and help make background scripts execute in a more timely fashion. Of course, you might have already done this too.

WordPress hits databases pretty hard. Typically one of the best speed boosts you can get when running it is to store as much of your database in memory as possible. The first step to this is making sure all of the tables in MySQL uses InnoDB and not MyISAM. Then tune innodb to store as much of the database in you RAM/memory as you feel comfortable allocating. On a typical VPS your MySQL server shares the same memory as your web server, so I would probably start by allocating 25-50% of memory to MySQL. It seems like you have about 30k posts, so even 25% of your 1.2GB of RAM is probably enough to store the entire database in memory.

If I were you I would start with those two things, the low hanging fruit. That should help limit variation and reduce speeds across the board, even with The Events Calendar disabled. I can’t predict how much it will help, every server is pretty unique. But it is absolutely worth a shot and might be a very noticeable amount.

Please let me know how it goes or if you have any questions. Cheers!

– Brook

[Support Droid]

Hey there! This thread has been pretty quiet for the last three weeks, so we’re going to go ahead and close it to avoid confusion with other topics. If you’re still looking for help with this, please do open a new thread, reference this one and we’d be more than happy to continue the conversation over there.

Thanks so much!
The Events Calendar Support Team

[Author]

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