Slow multisite

Cluster not responding fast

[CafeSelect]

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]

# uploaded files
RewriteRule ^files/(.+) wp-includes/ms-files.php?file=$1 [L]

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -f [OR]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -d
RewriteRule ^ - [L]
RewriteRule . index.php [L]

I have those rules in the httpd.conf file buy my sites are running slow. I've gone though as much as I can to speed to no avail so I thought I would as if those are the most efficient mod_rewrite rules for a large wordpress cluster in the form of site1.example.com site2.example.com.

[mememax]

I'll leave htaccess optimization to more experienced users but, have you tried the WP super cache plugin?

[lorax]

Have you done any testing on the sites to see what's causing the speed issue - eg. like database queries or calls to offsite resources (like Google Analytics)? Have you checked your javascript load order and do you have any unnecessary scripts being loaded that don't need to be?

[CafeSelect]

I did more testing and I can get the load time down around 3 secs but only if I don't use the main categories page of awpcp classifieds. I have many categories and I believe that the queries to retrieve them are lacking in some way.

I'll be examining them later. When I select settings reading static page > view categories load times improve to < 4 secs. It is when I'm choosing the main classifieds page as the main page the sites drag down.

Either way I'll have to quash all the work I've done and try again for something more stable with less hacking. Oh I went over everything from the headers down. Couple gotchas with the rss being included and the switching from one css to another.

I've tried with good results wp-minify. I'm pretty sure the rest of the drop in plugins are not going to help terribly much. Heck I'm even running mod_pagespeed on it all.

I'll try again to get the cluster working properly soon enough. Upgrade everything heck MySql is even supposed to be faster lately.

[CafeSelect]

I'm going to try posting this in the apache area for some introspection and analysis of the rewrite rules.

[rocknbil]

Most of the time, slowness in Wordpress is related to shared hosting - most shared hosting uses a remote (also shared) mysql server - or theme-related, many includes, graphics heavy. However, that set of rules does search the entire file system twice - once to see if the request is a file, then again to see if it's a directory.

If you're using extensionless URLs,

example.com/some-post-name

This one works pretty well. The reasoning is that only your images, etc. will have extensions. So if it doesn't have an extension defined with a dot, to Wordpress it goes.

RewriteRule ^([^.]+)$ /index.php [L]