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I ran up someone’s passive site on GoDaddy hosting, and also put up a testing subdomain to try a few things out. 

One of those was to see how ExpressionEngine would fare on the Economy hosting.  This is the USD 4.95/mo. variety.  So I put up the free EE version, plus a very little content, for a test.

My first experience was that as expected, it ran ok, not fast, and a bit variably.  With the Monday morning PST collision of East and West coast activities, it looked like my Swiss hosting used to before they fixed it.  Enough times, pages were back in 2-3 seconds, but one in 10 times, you could wait 10 to 15 seconds for a page load, reflected also in the diagnostic times.

In the loaded situation, I remembered I hadn’t set caching, and of course that helped, but did not eliminate the 10 second loading, sometimes several page loads in a row.  Not acceptable yet.

Then I experimented with the database persistence and caching. 

Bingo. Persistent sockets showed as it seems they often do, as actually a lower performance result. 

But then I tried turning _off_ database caching.  Performance skyrocketed:  Five to one better at least.  Now under the heavy load hours, 0.5 to 2 seconds max for page preparation and load on the browser.

On a quieter moment, 4pm this afternoon, I am getting 0.1-0.2 second page loads - once again, with the EE database caching turned _off_.  Page caching is of course on.

I think this is very interesting, as GoDaddy hosting appears to have some definite ‘layers’ between you and the shared-and otherwise virtual-Linux you have on the Economy hosting. You can’t get a command prompt, much less SSH, and must use the stock ftp-up-from-PC method of changing anything. However, I’ve been successful with such things as .htaccess files to remove the index.php?, and feel that actually this cheap hosting lets you do many things as long as you can be self-responsible for what you are doing.  Their online doc reads like that as well.

Now, that item about the great speed increase by turning _off_ EE database caching is the main reason for this note - just passing the information on. My thinking would be that having the EE db cache on meant two caching systems fighting each other, and thus that GoDaddy already has one.  The results are good, whatever the reason, if you take the less intuitive setting.

I’ll say a little more on the FastCGI side of things, and maybe one of you have some insight you’d like to share.

The reason for this EE exercise at all is for another potential client.  I have only the vaguest assurances after five or so tries over two weeks from GoDaddy tech support, that FastCGI is in place on the Deluxe and up shared machine hosting, but is not they say on the Economy model.  Properly implemented FastCGI what made my Swiss provider into a skyrocket, as you might expect.  When it works, the improvement is enormous.

I _hope_ what I am seeing here means the GoDaddy busy hour would be even better on Deluxe shared hosting, which is after all still only USD 7 or so a month, because it would have FastCGI.

Why their people will not be more clear about what they have is an interesting mystery. Some probably don’t know, but I think some do.  I suspect the answer is either:

- they do run all of the hosting behind a giant wall-of-mystery, and don’t like to say what they do.  In this case, it is probably right that things would improve by paying more.  That would be good.

- or, they actually run FastCGI all the time.  Looking at phpinfo () was a bit inconclusive, and since I can’t see a shell, much less a top or ps run, it’s hard to say.  My observation is that heavy load time activity looks like non-FastCGI, with the regularly occuring heavy peaks and slow pages, recover in between.  That comes because blocked, queued process and human interactions with them tend to make those peaks and valleys.

Anyway, would like to know what others have found with GoDaddy under Deluxe or better shared hosting.  For that matter, is a Virtual hosting with them any better?  Would be great if the Deluxe could do it for my client, without having to worry that even with my pretty good results it seems at first on Economy, they might get submerged.  I would not have that worry on that FastCGI Swiss hosting.

Thanks for your thoughts,
Clive

Moved to General Discussion by Moderator

Clive, this was more of a General Discussion topic, so I moved it there.

I’ve always found GoDaddy hosting to be extremely slow. But perhaps after using the tweaks you’ve posted might make it easier to deal with.

Thanks for posting.

Thanks, Sue, this is probably a better place.

Yes, maybe I got lucky, as it probably depends on what machine you are virtually on, who else might be associated, depending on how they worked out their arrangements.  Which again, they are not saying.

But the good results seem to continue this morning at rush hour.  Maximum 5 second rendering, typically less or much less than a second. 

The key is in that unusual setting for EE not to do database caching. 

Also of course to have your page caches.

I’ll say if it seems to get worse—and I am very interested in other persons’ experiences, particularly with the more expensive hosting levels which guarantee FastCGI.  I think that is not active here, from the performance pattern.

As far as my experience, FastCGI properly implemented is the key to a truly snappy ExpressionEngine site, wherever you are.  The speed is right up there with passive pages then, at least in what’s perceived.  And it doesn’t get worse, even under very heavy load, with FastCGI.  Some advantage in not having to start PHP up, do all your code interpreting, and indeed all the Zend etc. optimization, for each page load…!

Well.

Best regards,
Clive

Thank you, Clive, for looking into this issue.

I’ve been unhappy with the EE lag in performance on my economy GoDaddy account for some time.

After changing “Enable SQL Query Caching” to “No” I noticed an immediate reduction in page-load times.

-Chris

Very glad to hear it, cklimek.  That’s just the way I saw it too.

You reminded me to check my test site this morning, where enough days have gone by that the page caching will have run out. 

Results:

- first load of home and other pages:  about 5 seconds, as the uncached pages are built again.
- second load, now that pages are cached again:  between 0.1 and 0.5 seconds.  Very acceptable at 8 in the morning to say the least.

Best regards,
Clive

You seem to be spot on with this suggestion.

I have two clients that are on Deluxe Linux with GoDaddy.  The performance was spotty (in general Grid-Servers don’t work well with EE in our experience).  With template caching turned on and sql caching turned off, the pages load very quickly.  The performance is almost as good as some clients on VPSs!

We’ll give it a few more days and see if it is consistant but thanks for the tip!  We were thinking of moving off GoDaddy when the term was done, but if this works, we’ll probably keep these clients on.  GoDaddy isn’t a bad host, and for the cost they are great, but shared hosting isn’t the best route for EE.

Thanks narration!

The performance was spotty (in general Grid-Servers don’t work well with EE in our experience).

but shared hosting isn’t the best route for EE.

Of course I beg to differ on both counts 😉

Phire, thanks for letting me know it works for you also - increases confidence for future need.

I think we’d all like to use Nevin’s hosting, but this is not always possible economically, so it’s good to have alternatives at a service level.

Nevin, I think Phire’s comments on Grid Servers are pretty specific to the new thing GoDaddy is building up. I didn’t like the sound of some of it just reading there. 

And while you offer and I have had experience elsewhere of shared hosting that works quite well, there’s also a lot that doesn’t.  One of the essential for having it work at dependable speed with EE or any PHP-cetric aplication is that they run PHP as FastCGI.  This is becoming more common recently, it appears.  The no-database-caching can be an additional gain then - where it works.  My experience is limited, but was intense, and we have another datapoint or two in this discussion.

Best to both,
Clive

And while you offer and I have had experience elsewhere of shared hosting that works quite well, there’s also a lot that doesn’t.  One of the essential for having it work at dependable speed with EE or any PHP-cetric aplication is that they run PHP as FastCGI.

Yes, FastCGI is gaining traction in typical shared hosting as it allows for better performance and a bit better security in the typical shared hosting which all users are housed under the same apache processes (that of course is where much of the security fails down though).

The no-database-caching can be an additional gain then - where it works.  My experience is limited, but was intense, and we have another datapoint or two in this discussion.

While it may not be for an extreme traffic web site, the details here under the disk i/o section will shed a bit of light on this subject too.

-Nevin

Nevin, thanks - good information in that disk/io link.

Regards,
Clive

I just found this post, and all I can say is

THANK YOU! THANK YOU! BY ALL THAT IS HOLY AND GOOD IN THE WORLD, THANK YOU!!!

Ahem. That is all.

L.

Good stuff, Lamar 😉.  You are welcome.

And, it reminds me to write up/bug report some things I learned getting EE2.0 happy on a GoDaddy non-deluxe account also.

Regards,
Clive

Thanks for this post. I have been hunting for a reason why GoDaddy takes so long to serve my EE pages. I had everything cached and gzipped but the ee page get request was still sitting at around 10 seconds (longer in Safari for some reason). With sql query caching turned off the performance improvement has been incredible.

I’m not a fan of GoDaddy and their control panel / admin area is a confusing orgy of horrible advertising, but my client has several sites and domains with them and now I’ll be able to make them run at a decent speed, so thanks very much for this!

Good Job

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Luke, you’re most welcome. And in fact, you reminded as I’d forgotten my own advice on a recent EE 2.0 development installation, hadn’t checked as it had been working reasonably well. But once again, it’s working much better and more dependably with the drawbacks at this hosting location, once the DB Query caching is off.

It was kind of an interesting game two years ago, to see if a GoDaddy account could be made practicable, especially where there were end-customer preferences as you have, and it was good to see that it could, and that we could understand enough of the caveats.

That said, I’ve had reason to look at EngineHosting again recently, and notice they have among their offerings a $10/mo account—and that it can be had in $30 purchase blocks, as might be useful to know.

I must say this has been looking quite attractive, for all the good reasons.

Hosting can have a number of subtly important aspects, one can know from having run into a few of them, and I’m pretty convinced of EngineHosting’s value. 

Regards,
Clive