[loveslight]

Hello!

Our site is getting ready to launch soon and I’ve built out the forum structure to our liking but in testing we see that posting a new topic or replying to a topic in CERTAIN FORUMS can take up to 20 seconds after hitting submit for the post to save and appear. In all other forums it takes only 3 seconds. While I wish both were faster, how do we figure out what the 20 second delay is about?

Add this to the mix: Deleting a reply on the backend for the slow forum also takes 20 seconds compared to 3 seconds to delete for other forums…

20 second to post topic and delete reply forums:
https://www.myacim.com/sharing/forum/acim-lessons/

3 second to post topic and delete reply forums:

ACIM Text

Thank you for your help 🙂

Stats:

bbpress 2.5.8
wordpress 4.4.2
Jupiter theme, tested with generic 2015 theme too with no improvement
Disabled all plugins and problem remains
High speed VPS server using SSD drives, pre-launch / no traffic yet

[Robin W]

I’d try running the repairs first

Dashboard>tools>forums and use repair tab and run one at a time

[loveslight]

I ran the repairs and the problem still remains.

This is perplexing. When I compare the slow forums to the not slow forums I don’t see a difference. Both are under multiple “category” forums… (I was originally thinking maybe it’s slow because it’s two categories deep… but the faster forums are too.)

Slow:
HOME / FORUMS / ACIM LESSONS / LESSON 1 / LESSON 1 – INSIGHTS

Fast:
HOME / FORUMS / ACIM TEXT / PREFACE & INTRODUCTION / PREFACE & INTRODUCTION – INSIGHTS

————-

I was wondering if it’s a database issue? I looked to see if we had similarly titled pages that could be confusing WordPress. We do have similar pages:

Slow Forum:
HOME / FORUMS / ACIM LESSONS / LESSON 1 / LESSON 1 – INSIGHTS

WordPress page:
HOME / ACIM LESSONS / LESSON 1 /

— So, I changed those to the following:

Slow Forum:
HOME / FORUMS / ACIM LESSONS / LESSON 1 FORUM / LESSON 1 – INSIGHTS

WordPress page:
HOME / ACIM LESSON INDEX / LESSON 1 /

After changing I deleted old revisions and optimized database. The slow forums remained slow.

————-

You could just say to try to delete and recreate the slow ones… but there’s 365 top level category forums and each category has two categories within for a total of 1,095 forums to recreate.

(Before I get beat up on that, these are forums for a lesson book with 365 lessons and we wanted two categories within each lesson (sharing and Q&A))

————-

Thank you for continuing to help me figure this out!

[loveslight]

In addition to above, I just updated from 2.5.8 to bbpress 2.6, the problem remains.

Another note, I noticed when I submit a new topic or reply and wait the 17-20 second, if I hit refresh after 3 seconds it’s already there submitted and waiting on the page… it’s like behind the scenes it is working fast but there’s some delay for the browser to be told to go ahead and refresh to show the update. Maybe this info helps…

[Robin W]

hmmm… not sure what to suggest next – you have done good research and testing, and have a good problem definition.

So the forms have similar structure, and the problem is both in backend and front end. Disabling other plugins and changing theme has made no difference.

ok all I can think to do is to move a slow forum into a fast category (dashboard>forums>edit forum and change parent), and see if the problem stays with the forum. That might help define if it is a forum issue or a category issue.

[Robin W]

Can you also confirm that it also happens on another PC on another network using another browser – highly likely that the problem will still be there, but we are at the ‘eliminate everything’ stage !

[loveslight]

Robin! You lead me down the path to find the problem!

It turns out it was the enormous amount of forums/categories underneath one category. When I broke the 365 forum categories into groups of 50, the speed improved.

Here’s what I found:

Every 20 forum categories within another forum category adds another second to the posting time. So 365 lesson categories within a single category called lessons = 18 seconds for a post to save and appear. When I broke the 365 lesson categories into 7 categories (“lessons 1-50” and so on…) I got the posting speed down to 2.5 seconds.

1. Is there a known issue with bbpress slowing down where there are a large number of “category” forums within another category? Now we know that that’s what my problem was.

2. Since we’re a new site with no posts yet, I have faith that a large number of posts and replys won’t slow down the forums like the issue defined and resolved above. Care to reassure me on this? 🙂

Thank you so much for your help!!

[Robin W]

@netweb – can you help here?

The last post summarises the issue.

[senatorman]

Hopenly you don’t give up the search for a faster BBpress.

We migrating from phpbb to BBpress. and the new BBpress forum is ready for launch.
But we afraid the visitors are not happy with the speed and boycot out
So we waiting and hoping than anyone the speedproblem find and solve this huge problem.

Until the problem exist we still use phpBB

[drksecret]

I suddenly have the same issue. And I only have a handful of forums…
Submitting a reply takes 20 to 30 seconds which makes that the user clicks again and again, ending up with multiple replies.
I have no clue what it could be or how to solve this. Could it be a cron thing? That is the only thing I have changed on my site?