After having added, what, 10 comic series in slideshow format using RevSlider, the site slowed to a crawl. You literally could not work on the backend because every time you hit “Update” or “Publish” you’d get a long delay, then a 500 Server Error or a 404 or a “cannot connect” whitepage. The server kept resetting. while a great deal of the problem lies at GoDaddy’s bullshit “tier” system, where they “limit” your CPU usage or I/O level.
The tech told me it was to avoid DDS attacks, but that you could buy higher levels, meaning the real reason is they want tyou to pay for levels of memory that should be standard. Perhaps in a year we’ll look into moving again, although I don’t relish it. However, in the meantime, the situation was obviously intolerable, the site kept going offline, work on the site was impossible etc.
The next problem is that all the plugins for WP monitoring plugins and CPU usage are bullshit. I used the P3 memory monitor which breaks down usages by plugin. It said RevSlider was using a lot of resources, but not an astronomical amount, to the point I thought maybe that wasn’t the problem.
But it was. I researched other sliders, came up with Cyclone slider as the best, as in it didn’t load resources (images, js, css, etc) on pages that didn’t have sliders. I junked all the Revsliders (well over 150 f them) other than the frontpage, which I quite liked the effect. The results were amazing, now the site is operating fine, pages open, things update
But even so, there is probably a limit to how many more slider can be added. We are contemplating adding a Jay Naylor section and most of his stories (they are not issues, like other comics) are about 10 pages long, a few 40+ pages, but mostly very short. And there are a lot of them, nearly 100. So do we put up 100 new, very short, sliders? Doesn’t seem worth the trouble, but I hate thumbs and posting them one on top of another in ’90s fashion seems stupid as well. What is the solution? We’ll have to think on it.