Slow website on BT Advance web hosting (slow MySQL?)

[dsided]

We've recently upgraded the hosting to advanced so that we can run Joomla on the site.

Unfortunately I can count 4 "elephants" (4 seconds) before a page loads once I've clicked a link.

Has anyone else had this problem? Is the MySQL server running on an old server? All advise appreciated, otherwise we might have to use a different hosting company!

Also, clicking on "check spelling" when posting a new forum message doesn't work in Firefox and locks the screen.

[dsided]

bump - still finding the hosting slow. Have a look at http://www.mudchute.org

[dave]

I run both a Mediawiki aite and a phpBB site (both using MySQL 5) on BT's hosting and both are reasonably fast. None of the users have complained about speed issues.

Is it MySQL 4 or 5 that you are using?

[orchie]

Just checked in FireBug and it's 4 to 5 seconds to load a page before loading any CSS, JS or images. This looks to me that you've got a URL re-writing issue, what's the contents of your .htaccess file?

Try disabling URL rewriting and see what happens.

[dsided]

@dave - it's mysql 5 and when I had this on our staging server (not a BT hosting) it was very quick indeed, which make me think it's a BT issue.

@orchie - thanks, I renamed my .htaccess and the site is still really slow (no improvement). Any other ideas?

[orchie]

Hmm, a few other ideas:

1) What do you have your cache settings as? (Go to site > global configuration > system)

2) Did you CHMOD all your folders properly e.g. are the file permissions set to 777 for the folders 'tmp' and 'cache'

3) Try setting all SEO settings to 'NO'

4) Under site > global configuration > server turn off gzip compression

Try doing each of these indepently e.g. change them and try them, then change them back before doing the next point and let me know what happens, otherwise drop me a pm and I'll give you my contact details.

[dsided]

Sorry for the delayed response and thank you for your suggestions:

I used http://www.web-hosting-top.com/web-hosting/tools.website-speed-test for checking the speed.

Base speed for www.mudchute.org/about-us was @ 6 seconds.

1) Cache is turned off. If I turned it on its @3-4 seconds load time 🙂

2) There were 755 and I've tried them at 777, which is a security risk, and this has no affect on the load time. They're back at 755.

3) Turning off SEF urls makes loadtime the same @ 4 seconds.

4) This makes load time @ 4-5 seconds

Will send you a PM and post results here.

[dsided · Accepted solution]

We ended up leaving BT for a faster hosting company.

Page load time is now 600% faster

(www.mudchute.org/about-us takes 1 second)

Nothing was changed in the configuration which probably means BT is using old/slow equipment.