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I was testing Symbiostock locally and was getting really enthousiastic about it, until I installed it on my live site yesterday. My site was loading really fast (grade 99/100 Pingdom), even with a lot of images and Nextgen Pro installed, using a cache plugin and Cloudflare. But after installing and uploading ten testimages, the site became really slow. From loading within a second to about six seconds, even when revisiting a previously viewed image in Symbiostock, which also should be cached. I know this has to do with Woocommerce and not with Symbiostock, but I’m really disappointed about this. I’m on a shared hosting server, but until now that never was a problem, even with a lot of images on my site. I read about solutions, but even a dedicated WP host would mean improving the speed with one or two seconds, but the only real improvement could be made by moving my site to a VPS. And I really don’t want all that, not right now. Too bad there is no Woocommerce Light version, because in the end it all comes down to just posts/images and a shopping cart.
Speed is very dependent on the server and your distance to it. Six seconds is an insanely long amount of time – that is not normal.
Steve’s site:
http://www.backyardstockphotos.com/image/teco-railcar-to-ybor-city-in-tampa/
has something like 7000 images or something, and pages are loading in about a second for me.
Cristina is on PLUS and has over 2000 images I think:
http://innerstock.com/media/lenita-swimwear/
Again, about a second load time for me.
I do not think this is a WooCommerce, Symbiostock or WordPress issue – it appears to be either a database issue, a web server issue, or it may not even be an issue – it may be due to your specific IP location and the distance to the server. Sometimes a hop gets congested and only locally to you does it run sporadically slow. Post your site here and let others see if it loads fast or slow for them.
Shared servers generally get congested with database queries, and without doubt, WooCommerce requires a lot of database speed as well.
I think I’m beginning to see some progress.
Installing W3C and following a tutorial about the best settings for Woocommerce was a disaster. Loading times of pages, backend en frontend, increased to 30 seconds. In the past I have never been very succesfull with this plugin. WP Fastest Cache was what I used until now and I just tried Gator Cache, a pure page caching plugin, and that seems to be very promising. The load time of new images (products) is still a little bit on the long side, but after being opened one time the cache plugin serves the images almost immediately.
Testing: https://www.jacktummers.nl/product-categorie/nieuws-foto/
You can test it yourself. The first 4 pictures of students I didn’t click on yet.The backend when uploading and converting new jpegs is still very slow. Does this have to do with not having Imagick installed?
Under ‘Fotografie’ you will find my current install of NextGen Gallery. I like the presentation for images that are not really stock. A shame that I have to use two methods/plugins now. NextGen also offers e-commerce, but at the moment the SEO is not good and one can not search for specific images or use the tag system.
Out of about 20 pages, about 3 loaded slow randomly (when I refreshed, they were fast, etc).
The way it loaded slow appeared to be related to database queries. One interesting thing is the way WooCommerce works is that it caches related products for about 30 days – so the first time you load a product that has related products, it does a lot more database work than the next time you view that same product.
Nevertheless, I am convinced this has nothing to do with WooCommerce, WordPress or Symbiostock and is related to you being on a shared server where the database is randomly being saturated. You can install different plugins to compensate for this, but will get mixed results, as you are seeing. If you are able to get it to work at a level you are content with, good stuff.
You are probably right. I will keep on testing here and there to see if I can improve things a little bit more, but for now I’m already very pleased with the result. I didn’t know what you said about the WC cache related products, so good to know. Perhaps I will disable that.
Any idea about the long time it takes to proces images after uploading? Imagick?
And do I always have to go to the settings page to start the process or will it eventually start by itself?Hi Jack
My site was mentioned above as one that had good performance (thanks Robin!). I did decide to use a VPS in the end, and am in the process of moving my other websites to that and closing down a shared hosting plan I have with 1and1. After much research, I went with Inmotion Hosting as they have a good reputation and I found them to be very responsive at fixing my various issues. There is a special 12 month price of $29.95 per month.
I don’t use any caching – this is straight out of the box performance. I wrote more about the details of transitioning my site from the old Symbiostock on a different host to InMotion in this blog post:
http://www.backyardsilver.com/2015/07/learning-points-from-creating-a-new-symbiostock-website/
Steve
Docs on the processor:
http://www.symbiostock.org/docs/setting-up-the-schedulerimage-processor/
Processing images should be relatively quick as long as the processor has been added to run on your system’s scheduler once a minute. It does not run automatically as WordPress does not have a built in cron function (the makeshift one they use, that all other plugins use, is triggered on page loads – this is not desirable as if you have heavy processing, it will hang for a visitor and there is also the chance that the visitor can cancel the processing in the middle of it)
Again, the speed and efficacy of the processor depends on your server and will vary considerably. However, with Imagick, it is relatively fast.
@steve, thanks for dropping in on this question and explaining what you did. Sounds good and your site has a really good response time. Is this a managed VPS you have? I’m a Linux user myself, nevertheless I don’t really want to get into maintaining the server myself.
I think for now I will see how it goes, and if it really becomes a problem I will move to a VPS.
@robin Do I have to reference this task to a specific file? I can’t add it to my cronjob list otherwise. My hosting provider (Transip) uses his own system and asks me this. Perhaps I need to attach it to the index.php file?
That won’t work because the file cannot be executed through Linux. Try using this:
It may work for your needs as it seems to provide exactly what is needed – free too.
That website only allows for 50 runs a day.
But I think it is working now. I’m getting a mail every minute with this content. Does this mean it is working ok now?
My host runs FreeBSD by the way.,My hosting provider says there might be something missing in the url I used because the format is wrong (?).
I used only this part: https://www.jacktummers.nl/?c=1&ss_c=8ea259dfbb66af237ebc
of the total string: curl -silent -A ‘Mozilla’ ‘https://www.jacktummers.nl/?c=1&ss_c=8ea259dfbb66af237ebc’ >/dev/null 2>&1
Hi Jack
I’m using a managed VPS – in the sense that I am able to create new sites onto it so I can have multiple websites running on the server, but I haven’t had to do any server level work. The support team enabled the Imagick extensions for instance.
Steve
URL works fine – cron job result appears to be fine too, so you should be good to go.
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