I recently upgraded Debian to jessie on my server and also installed PHP 7 (with OpCache enabled) and Percona server 5.7 - the machine is fast, with 64GB RAM and SSD, and because I was moving up to PHP 7 I upgraded to
[bd] Widget Framework 2.6.3 - which works well.
Pages load quick enough, but after completing all the server upgrade work and testing with external tools I noticed there was a longish delay in TTFB for
www.cyclechat.net - so over the past few days have been changing and testing settings and narrowed it down to the home page having a longer TTFB than the internal pages (no sidebar). My other forums don't seem to have the same delay on their home pages, so after testing with various add-ons enabled / disabled the TTFB dropped from 0.8 to 0.2 when I disabled the widget framework.
The difference in sidebar blocks between CycleChat and the other sites was the
gallery block, so I disabled, tested, re-enabled and repeated the test and
the culprit is the Gallery Sidebar Block. Much as I like to display the most recent media - adding a
0.6ms longer TTFB for the home page seems like quite a punishing difference for a couple of thumbnails.
Does anyone know what is causing the gallery block to take longer to render and whether there is anything that could be done to reduce it?
Thanks,
Shaun
