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jorgesilva
Member

I'm using gravity forms on this website (http://www.backingbirmingham.com) to create a number of contact forms. While I'm really happy with how simple and powerful the plugin is there is an area of concern. The pages that have forms in them have taken a substantial performance hit. I understand that the forms are dynamically generated but I wasn't expecting such a drop in performance. The site is hosted on hour own dedicated server that only hosts a very small number of other websites and generally performance is blistering fast. Like I mentioned, every other page on the site loads very quick, except if I drop a gravity form on it. I wonder if it has to do with a server setting or I'm doing something wrong.

Here's a few pages where you can compare the performance:
No forms - http://www.backingbirmingham.com/
No forms - http://www.backingbirmingham.com/alum-rock
With 1 form - http://www.backingbirmingham.com/b-card
With 1 form - http://www.backingbirmingham.com/free-prize-draw

Posted 12 years ago on Wednesday October 5, 2011 | Permalink
Carl Hancock
Administrator

That isn't normal. They are unusually slow.

Do you have any kind of caching plugin or caching being used on the site?

You mentioned you have a dedicated server, do you have access to see things such as database analytics to look at query response times, slow queries, etc.?

This is definitely a server performance issue. If you visit the Contact Us page on our own site you'll see it doesn't have any performance issues related to Gravity Forms: http://www.gravityforms.com/contact-us/

Posted 12 years ago on Wednesday October 5, 2011 | Permalink
jorgesilva
Member

Hi Carl,
Thanks for coming back to me on this. There are no caching plugins on the site or any of the other sites for that matter. Here's a list of the plugins we are using:
- All in One SEO Pack
- Duplicate Post
- Magic-fields
- TinyMCE Advanced
- unFocus.Insensitivity
And of course - Gravity forms.

We have access to all the stuff in phpMyAdmin and command line access if necessary to check any logs. Nothing's been changed from the default installation though.

Yes, I'm convinced this is a server configuration issue too, problem is, we're not quite sure what to look for as the problem only seems to occur with Gravity Forms.

Posted 12 years ago on Thursday October 6, 2011 | Permalink
Carl Hancock
Administrator

I'm not sure what to look at as we haven't encountered this before. I would suggest trying to see a list of slow queries on your MySQL and see what they are and if they are Gravity Forms. It's definitely some sort of server issue. Probably database related.

Posted 12 years ago on Thursday October 6, 2011 | Permalink
jorgesilva
Member

Hi Carl,

Finally managed to enable log-slow-queries on the server. Despite it being running for a day the only slow query logged related to Gravity Forms was the following:

Count: 1 Time=4.16s (4s) Lock=0.00s (0s) Rows=0.0 (0), admin[admin]@localhost
SHOW CREATE TABLE backingbirmingham.wpbb_rg_form_meta

I think we can rule out slow queries. Any other ideas?

Posted 12 years ago on Tuesday October 11, 2011 | Permalink
Chris Hajer
Key Master

I loaded this page several times, after clearing the cache, and averaged 5.09s for a page load. Is that the amount we're calling slow, or am I not seeing the same problem? Just trying to get an idea of what slow is on this server. Thanks for any information.

Posted 12 years ago on Tuesday October 11, 2011 | Permalink
jorgesilva
Member

Hi Chris,

Thanks for your post, while 5s page load may not immediately seem slow you have to compare that with the performance of pages where Gravity Forms is not used where page load speed averages <1s... Is there any reason gravity forms should add >4s to a page load?

Posted 12 years ago on Wednesday October 12, 2011 | Permalink
Chris Hajer
Key Master

Got it, I just was unsure of the level of slowness we were talking about. Some quick tests:

[~/birmingham]$ time wget -q http://www.backingbirmingham.com/

real 0m2.485s
user 0m0.008s
sys 0m0.000s

[~/birmingham]$ time wget -q http://www.backingbirmingham.com/alum-rock

real 0m0.809s
user 0m0.004s
sys 0m0.004s

[~/birmingham]$ time wget -q http://www.backingbirmingham.com/b-card

real 0m4.857s
user 0m0.004s
sys 0m0.004s

[~/birmingham]$ time wget -q http://www.backingbirmingham.com/free-prize-draw

real 0m5.977s
user 0m0.000s
sys 0m0.008s

free-prize-draw is consistently slower than b-card (two pages with forms), and the home page is always slower than alum-rock (two pages without forms.)

Do you have access to any WordPress debugging tools?

Posted 12 years ago on Wednesday October 12, 2011 | Permalink
jorgesilva
Member

We've got full access to the server and WordPress, if you can point me in the right direction I'm sure I'd be able to install them.

Posted 12 years ago on Monday October 17, 2011 | Permalink
Chris Hajer
Key Master

This is a good one.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/core-control/

Posted 12 years ago on Monday October 17, 2011 | Permalink
jorgesilva
Member

Hi Chris,

I've installed it and enabled all the functions and logging. What should I be looking for?

Posted 12 years ago on Tuesday October 18, 2011 | Permalink
Chris Hajer
Key Master

Anything out of the ordinary, I guess. You never know what might show up when looking through logs. With so many different server configurations, it's hard to guess what you might find.

One thing I would do is try testing different types of Gravity Forms. A simple one with no AJAX and just a simple form field, and compare that to a regular page on your site. See if there are any significant differences with a simple form vs. a page with no form.

Posted 12 years ago on Tuesday October 18, 2011 | Permalink