Long time systems administrator, but first time supporting an ExpressionEngine application. This one is new to our organization, we just stood it up after moving it in from another hosting company.
And it’s a hog. I won’t bore you with stats and diagrams, but we have this sucker load balanced across three web hosts, two db servers. Under what we think of as a light test load the software just buckled. It’s dog slow under normal use.
We have the developers on the line to fix it: my job as the system admin is to find out what is wrong and then suggest to the application guys how to address it.
As I said, I’m new to EE. How do I go about applying Expression Engine troubleshooting steps to finding out what is wrong?
Hey -
Out of the box EE needs nowhere near that amount of resources, so it’s something to do with the way the site was built.
If it were mine to reverse engineer I’d start by seeing what/how many third party add-ons were installed. I’d be looking at db tables for something looking way out of whack. I’d turn on the output profiler and template debugger to see if particular templates or queries were the culprit. I’d be seeing what the various cache settings are. I’d be looking at the templates to see what coding approaches were used.
My guess is the site is pimped out with a ton of 3rd party stuff, and/or built in an inefficient way by someone who didn’t know what they were doing.
I recently rebuilt a site where the home page required ~1200 queries to load. My version used 10% of that for the same result. Point being - EE lets you quickly do a lot of things the wrong way.
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