CUNY Academic Commons

Syelle Graves adds:
Thank you so much, Marilyn. If it's helpful, I will add for our ticket that Laurie suggested deactivating unused plugins, and I did find and deactivate about 6, but doing so had no effect on the site speed.

In addition to visitors potentially being deterred from our site, I am struggling to make changes to it because of the extreme slowness. I have had changes that I make to pages revert the next day, and other times, the editor times out completely before my eyes, before my attempt at an edit can go through. One of my recent Redmine tickets about a YouTube video that would not embed was caused by this slowdown, I'm realizing now!

Please add Syelle to this ticket. Thanks!

Hi Syelle,

A part of the slowness can be attributed to the MetaSlider plugin. The MetaSlider plugin has a bug as outlined here: https://redmine.gc.cuny.edu/issues/15767#note-2. We put in a hotfix, but when we update plugins on a bi-weekly basis, we forgot to put back our hotfix since the MetaSlider team have not fixed the bug yet. So the slowness was brought back since late July. Apologies.

I've just reapplied our hotfix and that should speed things up a bit.

Let us know if that helps.

Ray, you are a gentleman and a scholar! I do see a difference. I'll let Alberta know. Thank you!

Are there other changes we could make?

Are there other changes we could make?

I would echo what Laurie mentioned. Try to find ways to reduce the number of plugins running on the site. Or find lighter alternatives.

I think I mentioned this in the past, but perhaps try experimenting with creating a test Commons site. Then, you can import the pages from the existing ILETC site and test out different themes and plugins, which you could then compare the load time to the current site.

The current ILETC site doesn't look that complicated compared to other Commons sites, so it might be worthwhile to try out. I understand that this might not be feasible given the time, effort and perhaps budget required though, but I thought it would be worth mentioning.