Forums › Forums › Search & Filter Pro › Speed considerations – your advice please

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  • Trevor
    (Private)  June 4, 2020 at 12:31 pm #247389

    The server stack and its configuration are critical to response times when a site is presented with an ad hoc request that necessitates repeated calls to the WordPress database, rather than providing cached content. If the server uses WHM/cPanel or Plesk or similar, there is a good chance that it will be slow. If it has a custom stack optimized for WordPress, it might be fine.

    Some hosting solutions, such as those offered by WP Engine, Siteground, Cloudways, have highly customized and optimized stacks (often further custom options are available), and also custom server admin panels, and they can be up 20 times faster than dedicated servers at actually delivering content (although searching will still be the slowest part of a site).

    ElasticSearch on the server also appears to offer speed improvements. It can be implemented in WordPress with the ElasticPress plugin, and some code in the functions.php to allow our plugin to use it. My personal hosting company (Cloudways) now offer ElasticSearch as a free one-click install (note our plugin business site uses WP Engine, not Cloudways).

    If the server has memcache/memcached (depends on PHP version), redis, varnish and ElasticSearch it will be faster. The issue is the bottleneck in the server when it has to fetch and process the data to find the matching posts for the search.

    Servers that cache the database tables (and indexes) in the CPU L1 or L2 cache will thus be much faster. This is very much a dark art on the part of hosting companies.

    Anonymous
    (Private)  June 4, 2020 at 4:33 pm #247465

    Trevor – from what you’re saying it seems like I needn’t get too hung up on the design but instead rather focus on the hosting overall. My current host uses Plesk. Thanks for the info. Very helpful.

    Trevor
    (Private)  June 4, 2020 at 4:48 pm #247473

    If you are in design mode, I would get that done and worry about the speed when done. If you need to, switching hosts or changing hosting package whilst staying with the same host is relatively easy. If you want to talk, just ask.

    Anonymous
    (Private)  June 4, 2020 at 5:04 pm #247481

    Yes, will concentrate on design as you suggest as it seems as if the design has less impact on the speed than the hosting.

    You can close this ticket. Thank you.

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