Forced to remove the theme

Unfortunately we were forced to remove the theme. After update has overloaded our server with a CPU utilization of 98%. It was a really nice theme but it seems that the plugin js_composer does not work well. In any case too slowed the website. We’ll see if something changes in the future, for now we are back to the old theme
Thanks to all

Same problem here! After the latest update the site is REALLY SLOW!

@Alin_Vlad

I’m getting the same kind of issue after updating to 1.7.

From what I can see, the new version of the theme doesn’t support caching. I don’t the POS overbloated W3TC to cache my site, but what I use worked perfectly before the update. Some features of a caching plugin *might* need some compatibility fixes for each theme, but the theme is disregarding header expiration settings even, so I doubt it’s the plugin. WP Fastest Cache is what I’ve used with NewsMag and Newspaper with no issues.

All images are having to load fresh on every page load, whether it’s a VC template page or a standard single post.

My site background is also only loading once out of every 3-4 page loads. Not sure if that’s related to the slowdown or not, but there it is.

Site in question is http://bluestartimes.com.

• This reply was modified 11 years by Bryson T.

As I’ve mentioned in a previous post, WP Fastest Cache is the highest performing caching plugin for tagDiv themes. I have yet to test the other caching plugins on 1.7, but this new update is no longer compatible with WP Fastest Cache. I only mention that because this plugin works on many themes, meaning it is compliant with WordPress standards and NewsMag now affects the WordPress core somehow.

1.7 dropped my pagespeed score from 89-93 to 62 and below. There were no other changes to the site. I updated the theme plugins by deleting the old plugins and installing the new plugins. As for the theme, I replaced changed files from the patch folder.

I’ll update here when I’ve tested other caching plugins with 1.7.

Okay, all on the same site listed above, I’ve tried these plugins with 1.7:

Zen Cache – 62 Desktop PageSpeed Score
WP Super Cache – 62 Desktop PageSpeed Score
Gator Cache – 62 Desktop PageSpeed Score
WP Fastest Cache – 62 Desktop PageSpeed Score
W3 Total Cache – 68 Desktop PageSpeed Score
No Cache – 62 Desktop PageSpeed Score

On all tests I had the speed booster plugin enabled. I also ran tests before and after browsing the site to populate the cache.

I find it interesting that the only plugin that gained even a single point on the page speed test was W3TC. I hate this plugin. It’s constantly taking me to the plugin dashboard when I want settings, has annoying popups on the admin, and slows down the back end of any site it’s installed on.

Why are none of the other plugins reporting any difference at all? All of the caching plugins besides W3TC had the same effect as having no caching plugin installed.

I like the lazy loading on the new update, but if I have to entirely sacrifice my choice of compatible caching plugins to have it, I’d rather not. Can I turn the lazy load off to test these again?

Something is wrong if the only caching plugin that has any effect is W3TC. Before the 1.7 update, all of the tested plugins listed above worked to varying degrees with NewsMag. Some were better than others and every single one got my page speed score of the site as it is now over 80. None of them even hit 70 with 1.7.

Sorry to keep going on and on about this but it’s a MAJOR issue. You’ve already got customers ditching the theme above over it. What can be done about this?

Thanks.

I think you have some good points!

I believe there was a post yesterday morning on how to turn off the lazy loading, so you might have to find that giant thread on that topic.

I am very curious what your results would be with that OFF.

It is cool, but I had major problems with that this time last year testing lazy loading with newspaper theme and chose NOT to use it. Even though, technically it’s supposed to help with mobile…

@neotrope Thanks, Chris. As requested, here are the results with lazy loading off.

Zen Cache – Did not Re-Test
Gator Cache – Did not Re-Test

Page Speed Scores With Lazy Load Off – Speed Booster On
WP Super Cache – 56 Desktop, 43 Mobile
WP Fastest Cache – 62 Desktop, 41 Mobile
W3 Total Cache – 68 Desktop, 47 Mobile
No Cache – 62 Desktop

Page Speed Scores With Lazy Load Off – Speed Booster Off
WP Super Cache – 57 Desktop, 43 Mobile
WP Fastest Cache – 57 Desktop, 49 Mobile
W3 Total Cache – 71 Desktop, 51 Mobile
No Cache – 38 Desktop

Apparently, the Speed Booster plugin hurts mobile browsing across the board. The mobile scores with no caching was mid to upper 20s without and without Speed Booster. Speed Booster also seemed to hurt performance for all but WP Fastest Cache.

The lazy load feature actually had a positive effect on page speed when it was turned on.

However, the lazy load feature *looks* slower because of the delayed loading of above the fold content. Lazy loading content below the fold I understand, but above the fold content should always load first. Lazy loading seems to put structure ahead of content and that’s a bad thing no matter how fast things are loading.

Overall, 1.7 loads much slower than 1.5. As I said, my page speed scores for this exact site were all 85+ for desktop and 65+ for mobile with NewsMag 1.5, but 20-30 points lower for NewsMag 1.7. Tells me development is going backwards. No feature is good enough to justify slower loading times, unless you’re running a perfect 100/100 already. The scores I’m talking about include several AdSense ads per page in all situations.

There are two ways of looking at page speed; the most accurate is a page speed test where things are ranked evenly, even though I’m getting charged for Google Fonts that don’t appear anywhere in my theme (I switched it all to system fonts). But the most frustrating is the eye test; how fast the pages appear to load while you’re browsing. I was surprised during these tests to find that WP Super Cache (the good ole basic caching plugin by Automattic) made the content on the pages load quicker. The overall page load may have been slower or negligible, but when I opened any page, the first thing that appeared was the content, followed by the header, sidebar and background, and finally the ads.

I should also note that I was using the built in pre-load feature for the tests on WP Super Cache with lazy load and speed booster on, but I wasn’t using the pre-load feature for the tests included in this post.

I am noticing my 1.7 pages are loading muuuuuch slower than the 1.6 test sites.

Today I can’t fully judge as we were being slammed by yandex …. and others … from Russia.

Server processes spiked at 270 once, which surprised me it didn’t melt. Normal is 0.9 to 1.2 (!).

On 1.7 it’s taking forever right now to even preview a page. Frustrating.

Also weird is that my animated GIF keeps getting turned into a jepg even when I upload via FTP. (WTF?)

Soooooo……. we’re definitely NOT in the Summer of Speed we had going with Newspaper, that’s for darn sure.

Not quite sure what to do just yet. But it’s noticeable the speed hit visually …

Yes it is. I noticed on the first page load after the upgrade. I never worked with 1.6 because of all the issues around the social counter plugin. I planned to set aside some time to work that all out and test things and was looking for an off-peak time to do it, in case there was any down time. Never got around to it until today. So, I patched from 1.5 => 1.6 with updated plugins for that version and then patched again from 1.6 => to 1.7 immediately after.

I know the PHP version compatibility issues were with 1.7 and not 1.6, though maybe that ended up being the issue with the social counter plugin (idk?). But I have no clue how fast 1.6 was.

I thought disabling lazy loading would make a bigger difference than it did. It doesn’t surprise me that your server processes went up so high after reading about the YANDEX issue. I’m going to check tomorrow and see how my GPU usage was affected by moving to 1.7 today. Not showing any increase so far but I’ll know for sure tomorrow.

Not at all useful on the .gif issue since I never use them, but that sure does remind me of how Windows handles the .gif format without the proper codecs and such; converts them to jpegs outside of a browser.

I may try to roll back to 1.6 on one site as it’s deathly slow …

see:
http://enewschannels.com …… (1.7)

speedy
http://musewire.com ….. (1.6)

(and this is with server under attack right now …)

• This reply was modified 11 years by simchris.

I just turned off whole bunch of stuff like “related posts” and removed on ad from sidebar, removed new items from footer 2 (replaced with subscribe), removed images from sidebar for new stories …

home page comes up in 6-9 seconds, vs 1-3 for the other site.

Crazy. Same server. Same php memory. Same mod_pagespeed settings.

And the 1.7 site is loading the gravatars locally, too … still hideously slow.

• This reply was modified 11 years by simchris.

Yeah, got them both open right now in Chrome and eNews is stalling for several seconds before it even starts displaying the next page. Whereas Muse Wire responds instantly on most pages, though a 1-2 second delay occasionally (from the current server load I’d imagine).

When you updated the one to 1.7, did you:

1. completely remove and install the new version fresh
2. overwrite the old version entirely
3. overwrite the changed files from the patch directory with new versions

Curious if something was missed in the patch files that could be contributing to such disparaging results between versions.

After 9 years with WordPress and 20 years with webdev… and the sticky post in this forum on how to upgrade the theme … um, yeah… I updated it with fresh version.

I have to do completely fresh version as I tweak the theme for some minor things like custom field for hit counter, remove the XLRPC thing from header, minify the style.css, remove the breadcrumbs from search template, and put in our custom functions for optimization and disabling some things like not loading the visual composer CSS on post pages, etc.

So, in theory all things being equal the 1.7 site should behave just like the 1.6 sites except with lazy loading on top.

And I never use child themes, and all files are uploaded with Linux/unix line breaks vs windows, etc.

(I’m an advanced user …. obviously …)

Hence my … what the hell, man reaction with the ENC site.

So… going to roll that back once I get couple more client things done.

Basically going to use our tweaked 1.6 version – same exact thing running musewire.

Of course the dbase for ENC is hideously huge, and 10x the size of musewire, but other than that …

We have 32GB RAM, 12 cores of XEON power, and dedicated gigabit switch in Class A datacenter (SoftLayer) … so, we’ve got the juice.

ENC has 512MB allocated to PHP. So… may I just say … “sheesh!” 🙂

normal server response time is 0.31 seconds, and today it’s been averaging 1.6 seconds … which shows how much the attack has been messing with us.

I’m going to try the dirty in place rollback,
which basically entails via FTP quickly deleting the theme,
replacing,
quickly deleting the td plugins
replacing,
then login see if it still works with transient settings retained.

Dirty way of doing it quickly without first disabling everything and changing themes.

Normally works if nobody logged in and going up a revision; so will see if works going back. If not, can always reset and do it the long way (as per my “how to upgrade” sticky post ….)…..

so… site going DOWN …. (!)

stay tuned…..

I’ve seen the sticky posts about upgrading so I sort of already knew the answer, but wanted to be sure. I used the patch files myself. I’ll roll back my install to 1.6 as well, until someone can identify and safely remove the bug up 1.7’s butt.

There are a lot of optimizations that could be done, but I never get around to doing it. I rely on folks like you – with multiple sites generating primary income – for the optimizations I intend to try. My single site is a side-project that doesn’t pay any bills, so I’ve got much less incentive to pull my hair out (test and re-test various tricks).

That said, time to see about these mods you just mentioned 🙂

Do you use a service or program to minify the stylesheet? Manually compressing more than 20,000 lines is exactly why people procrastinate.

ENC Definitely picked up speed from the changed, even when checking during your downgrade.

There’s no question about it, NewsMag 1.7 has something wrong with it that’s affecting installations on multiple server platforms, types, and configurations.

Looking at the update log for 1.7 I only see one possibility for where the problem could be, and that’s in the lazy loading code. The adjustments to the search function could be causing it, which seems unlikely, but there is no longer an option to enable/disable the search from the main menu.

I know there were instructions for disabling the lazy loading feature, but 2 lines of php and one CSS class do not a comprehensive lazy load make. I can’t think of anything that would cause every entire page to load at half speed, or worse.

Obviously the quick and dirty method worked
(trick is to delete via filemanager on server; then upload via FTP)

Always amazed that works. 😉
So, 10 minutes … and I just switched back on Disqus, photo new items right side, third ad, and the pages are 10x faster at least … maybe 20x faster…

so… shazam… there you are. In our case 1.7 does NOT work well with all the snazzo-riffic hardware, bandwidth, mod_pagespeed and other stuff we have on tap. 1.6 literally rocks.

I do believe you are correct in that some other things related to php queries and whatnot are baked in someplace, as that is HUGE difference.

from theme panel, click home page button – 2 seconds in IE 11 Win7/64. Previously 20 seconds … soooooo….

okay, happy that worked.

I guess we’re not crazy, then 🙂

So is this being fixed by the developers? Best thing to do is stay with 1.6 for now?

Thanks
Ray

1.6 working on 3 websites; 1.7 on one website almost killed server (seriously!)

The Devs are working on several fixes for the theme currently, but no indication yet that they’ve identified a source for the slow down.

I’d stay with 1.6 for now.