Removing index.php makes affects performance
How Do I?
Hello,
our website has around 250.000+ entries with about 1.5 - 2 million monthly visitors. We’ve noticed lately that performance has been degrading. Apparently it came down to the rewriterules that remove index.php from the URL in .htaccess We are using the recommended settings found on the current EE guide (for .htaccess)
For example. With the .htaccess in place accessing /admin.php takes more than 10 seconds when in full traffic. Removing .htaccess (and hence no more index.php rewrites) the /admin.php sections loads in about a second or two. So it makes a big difference.
Site is on a pretty big dedicated server with load less than 2% when in full traffic. So this doesn’t seem to be a server related problem, rather than an EE problem coping with large traffic and having to implement rewrite rules.
Nothing else is on the .htaccess file other than what is recommended on the guide.
Does anyone know how to fix this? How to approach it? I am somewhat lost on what to try to be honest… tried all sort of different rewrite rules…. no luck.
also found this post http://expressionengine.stackexchange.com/questions/18085/when-removing-index-php-slow-down-the-site
tried everything there - no luck.
Any ideas?
I’ve seen this on a couple of EE sites that we took over from other developers. It was caused by an add-on that had never been correctly re-configured when the site was moved from it’s development server to it’s production server.
We found the issue by reading the server’s error logs. The add-on (sorry, don’t remember which one it was) had some local development paths in it’s settings that was causing a ton of errors every time we tried to open a Publish/Edit page in EE’s CP.
Once we fixed the paths, then the CP loaded faster. Then we could see that a couple of add-ons were running a bunch of extra queries when the CP was loading, and we eventually redeveloped the whole site from scratch in house to get the site loading correctly. We never did fully understand what the add-on(s) were all doing, just that this site didn’t need them.
So I would start with your server logs, see what errors are piling up, and track those back to see if you have some bad paths in an add-on, or if you might have an add-on that needs to be updated to work correctly with the build/version of EE you are running.
It’s a place to start.
Thank you for your reply! Before start looking at the log files I must point out the website has been the same for more than a year, no updates, no new add-ons, same .htaccess configuration, same traffic. Everything was fine until recently. Could it still be an add-on? The dedicated server the site runs on was update to the latest CentOS - could this be a reason why now the rewrite rules cause so much slowdown on the CP?
Thank you!
I wouldn’t rule out the add-ons unless the log files are clean. You just need to spot what’s going on during those 10 seconds that you are waiting for the CP to load, and the logs are a great place to do that.
Also, if EE hasn’t been updated in a year, and the add-ons also haven’t been updated in a year, then updating all that software might take care of this issue without ever having to find out what was the cause.
Instinct says its a path/permissions issue where some add-on is having trouble getting to some resource it needs, and is holding up the whole show until it gives up trying. It could be that it’s something you aren’t even using anymore (some add-on you tried out, then abandoned without totally removing it) that has a configuration file, or image deep in a /third_party/folder. Or perhaps it relies on an externally hosted resource (jquery tools?) that might no longer be available.
You could also turn on EE error reporting and see if you can spot what’s happening after the CP loads, but my money’s on the log file holding the key to this mystery.
Thanks Kurt - it was a server setting after all. Altered lightspeed configuration a bit and now everything is fine. Thank you for your help!