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I rent Windows 2008 64 R2 on a shared hosting environment with the following specs:

  • Intel XEON E5520 @ 2.27GHZ
  • 2 GB RAM
  • IIS 7.5
  • PHP v5.4
  • MySQL 5.5.27
  • FastCGI

Normally, I develop for .NET, and my websites are working great with fast rendering times.

However, I have a couple of Wordpress sites as well, and they are rather slow compared to the .NET websites. Today, I decided to investigate this. I just installed a fresh WordPress 3.8 copy using WPI (Web Platform Installer).

The website takes about 1.1 seconds to render (so it takes 1.1 seconds before any response is returned from my web server), which is, in my opinion, really slow.

I didn't install PHP/MySQL on the server myself, but I think that the best well known practices are in place, at least FastCGI is installed.

But still, I believe that Wordpress should be performing much better, even on a WIMP environment.

So, my questions are:

  • Should I expect more performance with this setup on the given environment (no additional optimizations such as caching), or is 1.1 seconds of rendering time normal?
  • And if so, any ideas on what's going on?

Btw, I know that I can speedup Wordpress somewhat by using plugins like W3TC.

Gerhard Schreurs
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  • 2gig is damn small for 2k8R2 server. You wouldn't even want to run a standard win7 desktop in 2gig, let along a webserver + database – Marc B Apr 08 '14 at 18:35
  • Yes, I agree that 2gig is not that much. However, the server is just running fine, handling more than 100000 requests a day, and since it is a server, it is only running the absolute minimum of required services. At the moment the server has around 900MB memory available, while I am using remote desktop connection. So, I don't believe that Wordpress is slow because of a lack of memory, but I'm not a system administrator. – Gerhard Schreurs Apr 08 '14 at 18:58
  • If the content you serve doesn't change often, perhaps you could look into caching the results which might improve performance a lot: http://www.microsoft.com/web/post/performance-tuning-php-apps-on-windowsiis-with-output-caching – Wolfgang Schreurs Apr 08 '14 at 21:18
  • Thank you for your tip; caching is indeed a great idea to boost performance. However; I'm sorry, but this does not answer my first question. I'll update that question to be more specific. Also, I am aware about caching mechanisms, that is why I mentioned the W3TC plugin (W3 Total Cache). With this plugin I have many options for caching and other performance options; way more than IIS' own output caching mechanism provides. – Gerhard Schreurs Apr 09 '14 at 13:00

1 Answers1

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Today, I finally was able to fix my slow loading problem; until now, my Wordpress sites where still loading slowly.

By chance, I stumbled upon this article:

http://www.customfitonline.com/news/2013/6/20/solve-wordpress-on-windows-server-problems/

I was like, let's try that "Slow Page Loading" tip, change localhost to 127.0.0.1 in wp_config.php:

define('DB_HOST', 'localhost');

To

define('DB_HOST', '127.0.0.1');

Sure enough, this setting makes a HUGE difference in page loading!

Gerhard Schreurs
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