Is there a way to make standard, small VMs more responsive and less erratic within WordPress admin?
This week I provisioned an A1 Ubuntu (LAMP) VM and an A1 Windows 2012 R2 (WIMP) to run WordPress sites with WooCommerce shopping carts (five to start with), and was disappointed with the slow TCP/IP response and processing, which made working in /wp-admin/ almost unbearably slow. The installs were primarily by-the-book default, having followed Azure documentation.
I decided I needed more power behind the VM so I provisioned a "Standard" WEST US - D1 Series, 1 core, 3.5 GB RAM 50 GB SSD VM with 2012 R2 and a WAMP stack installed via Web Platform Installer. This was a "stock" install with WP talking to an localhost MySQL engine. The D1 experience was very similar to the A1 experience with a CPU in the teens-to-less than 50%. Memory usage never exceeded 50%, yet /wp-admin/ was very slow. Frequently database-heavy jobs, like WP-Optimize would time out.
*Note* Both A1 and D1 VM served up cached (front-end) web pages in around two seconds. Barely acceptable, but acceptable.
Throughout the week I noticed that the instance would slow to a crawl or become unresponsive. No HTTP response, and I could not RDP or FTP into the instance. PHP logs showed time-out errors as did MySQL logs. This happened two or three times a day. On Wednesday, my instance rebooted automatically with a kernel stop error in the event logs. TCP/IP response was erratic and slowdown were sporadic.
*Note* Azure Status showed all green checks for the WEST US region whenever I had sporadic slowdowns or issues.
Late yesterday I provisioned a Rackspace Dallas Fort Worth Windows 2012 R2 2-thread core, 2 GB RAM, 50 GB raid-10 SSD VM with the same installation (Web PI WIMP - "stock"). The difference in response times is striking. Rackspace is around a second faster for most network GETs.
I've invested a lot of time in Azure (have thirty small non-VM web-sites) and like the flexibility, but not the slow and erratic VM response. I've researched a lot of blog posts here and on Stackoverflow but haven't been able to speed things up. Is there something special that can be done to improve processing WordPress on Azure VMs?
This week I provisioned an A1 Ubuntu (LAMP) VM and an A1 Windows 2012 R2 (WIMP) to run WordPress sites with WooCommerce shopping carts (five to start with), and was disappointed with the slow TCP/IP response and processing, which made working in /wp-admin/ almost unbearably slow. The installs were primarily by-the-book default, having followed Azure documentation.
I decided I needed more power behind the VM so I provisioned a "Standard" WEST US - D1 Series, 1 core, 3.5 GB RAM 50 GB SSD VM with 2012 R2 and a WAMP stack installed via Web Platform Installer. This was a "stock" install with WP talking to an localhost MySQL engine. The D1 experience was very similar to the A1 experience with a CPU in the teens-to-less than 50%. Memory usage never exceeded 50%, yet /wp-admin/ was very slow. Frequently database-heavy jobs, like WP-Optimize would time out.
*Note* Both A1 and D1 VM served up cached (front-end) web pages in around two seconds. Barely acceptable, but acceptable.
Throughout the week I noticed that the instance would slow to a crawl or become unresponsive. No HTTP response, and I could not RDP or FTP into the instance. PHP logs showed time-out errors as did MySQL logs. This happened two or three times a day. On Wednesday, my instance rebooted automatically with a kernel stop error in the event logs. TCP/IP response was erratic and slowdown were sporadic.
*Note* Azure Status showed all green checks for the WEST US region whenever I had sporadic slowdowns or issues.
Late yesterday I provisioned a Rackspace Dallas Fort Worth Windows 2012 R2 2-thread core, 2 GB RAM, 50 GB raid-10 SSD VM with the same installation (Web PI WIMP - "stock"). The difference in response times is striking. Rackspace is around a second faster for most network GETs.
I've invested a lot of time in Azure (have thirty small non-VM web-sites) and like the flexibility, but not the slow and erratic VM response. I've researched a lot of blog posts here and on Stackoverflow but haven't been able to speed things up. Is there something special that can be done to improve processing WordPress on Azure VMs?