So I decided last week to get all of our site's pages into wordpress - including the homepage. Because our homepage is very custom and has a whole pile of things that have to be embedded (like flash video spots etc) I chose to basically remove everything in themes/home.php and just add in the straight xhtml/css to the file. The performance of this page is astonishingly slower than the original xhtml version of the page:
the dev site
versus
the live site
As you will notice the page loads significantly slower even though it's not using any aspect of wordpress other than the theme (ie no plugins etc. etc.)
I've tried WP object cache and super cache with no additional help - since the data isn't in the database it isn't being cached. How can the theme slow the site down so much?
See here for page response times:
http://www.iwebtool.com/speed_test?domain=http%3A%2F%2Ftmcyouth.comhttp%3A%2F%2Fdev.tmcyouthbeta.com
Also according to this test page load times went from 0.33 seconds (on the live site) to 7.56 seconds (dev site). Brutal.
One more discovery...
There are several php includes on the page that are included in both the live version and also in the dev version. The interesting thing is that if I take the includes out of WPMU then the site loads in 0.39 seconds instead of 7.56seconds.
The include is structured like this:
<?php include $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'].'/includes/menus/mm-videos-podcasts.php'; ?>
So are there any known performance issues with including files into wordpress like this?
Aha found the problem to be one of my includes which was using magpie RSS and I didn't have the cache setup properly for magpie... so it wasn't a Wordpress issue at all.
