website is slow (libravatar)

[jive]

In testing with real users at foss4gna it was noted that the website is too slow (clicking multiple times to load a project page due to lack of response).

As I understand it Wordpress processes a database to generate each page, and a range of caching plugins are used so this only occurs when the content changes.

• Look at theme performance - our theme does a lot so it is probably slow
• Caching plugin - not sure if we use one
• Content Delivery Network - not sure if we use one
• Optimize images - we already use smush
• expires header to static resources?
• disable gravitar - we added this after Get Interactive gave us the site

I do not really mind what we do, but we should look at performance and do something ...

Reference:

• ​https://www.sparringmind.com/speed-up-wordpress/

[wildintellect]

• Sure a page load analysis is a good idea. Anyone have tool in mind to get some numbers?
• Caching - We should probably use the web server in front of Wordpress to handle this to avoid introducing complex dependencies in Wordpress. Focus on caching the static assets like images, css, js libraries etc. Also we should audit that the js libraries are coming from popular CDN for js.
• We do not currently use a CDN, we would need to scope the cost, CDNs are not cheap. Cloudflare is another option but there have been issues with access for some countries when using such a product.

[robe]

Moving this to contract 2

[robe]

Jive I think things improved since I moved www.osgeo.org to our own hardware. I think we still have things we can improve like reducing size of some images.

I installed imagemagick, bcmath as those were noted as missing and beneficial to wordpress.

[robe]

QGIS hung and was giving a 500 error. error log showed lots of errors coming from

PHP Warning: shuffle() expects parameter 1 to be array, boolean given in /var/www/osgeo.org/httpdocs/wp-content/plugins/libravatar-replace/classes/ServicesLibravatar.class.php

I've disabled libavatar replace, per Jody's request and now QGIS page comes up right away.

[robe]

I've also renabled classic editor as some pages couldn't be editable. I also upped cap to 8GB/ 4 CPU from 4GB / 2 CPU.

[robe]

Everything seems much faster after disabling libavatar replace, even the User group list is now speedy where as it was a dog before (as Jody commented, he had time before to get a cup of tea while the page loaded).

That said I think things are fast enough now.

If people still see more issues, feel free to reopen.

[strk]

I filed ​https://github.com/sunchaserinfo/wp-libravatar-replace/issues/2 in case things can be improved. Another libravatar plugin that could be tested (in stage?) would be ​https://wordpress.org/plugins/libravatar/

[robe]

Do we really need libravata anything? The less plugins the better.

[strk]

Really really ? No.

[robe]

the more plugins you have intstalled the larger your vulnerability surface for exploits. So unless we need it, we probably shouldn't bother. We probably should be more vigilant about the plugins we install.

[strk]

For the record: the libravatar plugin got improved (thanks to us filing the issue) to have DNS caching enabled. I'd like to see the plugin back in place :)

​https://github.com/sunchaserinfo/wp-libravatar-replace/issues/2#issuecomment-560671418

We "need" it ? No. There are lots of things we don't really need but are nice-haves.

[strk]

The new version of the plugin seems to be running on the staging version of website: ​https://dev.www.osgeo.org/projects/postgis/