Speed Issues on Local Machine

I would also love to hear a clue from clay as to when this release would be … released? :slight_smile:

I have been successful on my Mac to boost the performance and stability a little bit by tweaking the Virtual Machine and giving more resources, RAM in particular.

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Unfortunately I can’t give the word quite yet but it’ll be soon™ :slight_smile:

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Hi all,

Be sure to check out Local 2.0. It has various site performance improvements.

For more info please see Local by Flywheel 2.0.0 (Pre-release)

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I’m still getting very slow speeds on my local machine. I checked for the php.ini file in the site I made post the newest update and it doesn’t have one. Any suggestions

where is the conf folder/files? it is not in my local sites folder anywhere (on windows)

@DawnCreative

Are you running macOS or Windows? Are brand new sites slow for you?


@snake

If you’re using the “Preferred” environment the conf directory is not available. It’s only available for sites using the “Custom” environment.

I am running Windows. Yes, brand new site is slow for me.

I’m experiencing slowness on Windows as well and I guess I’ll comment here rather than create a new topic for this.

I was originally running PHP5.2 (to try to catch errors with it) and it was really slow. I then tried a whole heap of different configurations, mostly with X_DEBUG on as I need it. Anyway, I measured some times for you.

I was using a new site, with only the Theme Unit Test data loaded. I loaded the a) Posts screen and b) Edit post screen for the “Markup: Text Alignment” post ten times each, measuring the Finish time in Chrome Developers Tools. The averages are as follows:

  • Local, PHP 5.2, X_DEBUG on, loading Posts screen: 10.37
  • Local, PHP 5.2, X_DEBUG on, editing post: 12.92
  • Local, PHP 5.6, X_DEBUG on, loading Posts screen: 7.52
  • Local, PHP 5.6, X_DEBUG on, editing post: 8.72
  • Local, Apache, PHP 5.6, X_DEBUG on, loading Posts screen: 6.41
  • Local, Apache, PHP 5.6, X_DEBUG on, editing post: 8.55
  • Local, PHP 7, X_DEBUG on, loading Posts screen: 6.74
  • Local, PHP 7, X_DEBUG on, editing post: 8.04
  • Local, PHP 7, X_DEBUG off, loading Posts screen: 5.40
  • Local, PHP 7, X_DEBUG off, editing post: 7.38
  • Xampp, PHP 5.6, X_DEBUG on, loading Posts screen: 2.66
  • Xampp, PHP 5.6, X_DEBUG on, editing post: 3.23

Not sure what you’ll get from that, but maybe it will be helpful. Mostly it makes sense: newer versions of PHP are faster, X_DEBUG off is faster, etc. But it’s weird that Apache seems faster than nginx, I would have thought it would be the other way around.

The last two times are Xampp, which is what I’m considering moving away from, and as you can see it is way faster than Local. I get that I’m comparing apples and oranges and Xampp is always going to be faster, but I was surprised how much faster.

Oh, the site was quite a lot slower than all those numbers above when I had the Query Monitor plugin loaded, but I deactivated it before testing.

Anyway, I hope this helps.

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@StephenCronin

Thanks for the detailed info!

We do have plans of speeding up Local on Windows. In Local 2.0 we added NFS support (AKA "Faster Docker Volumes) for the Docker Machine but Windows does not ship with NFS like macOS does.

We’re still evaluating options including Hyper-V support for Windows 10 Pro.

If you want to do some Googling for ideas, you can look up something like:

Speed up VirtualBox shared folders on Windows

I thought DesktopServer for Windows was slow, but Local is far far slower. I’ve tried all the above and it’s still super slow. Any further suggestions or fixes?

@Athlone,

Are you on macOS or Windows?

I’m to the point of scrapping Local and going back to running off of my remote server, which is nothing special but faster than Local running off of my RAID-0 SSD work drives. I really don’t get it. I’ve also had themes that simply will not work in Local, despite everything being in order and with settings tinkering in Local and the site itself. If it matters I can give a list.

Overall, the situation is disappointing. There’s so much potential for Flywheel to be a real solution to a wide range of issues I’ve experienced working on my sites remotely. Unfortunately, the two main issues I need Local to solve: stable, desktop-like speeds and broad compatibility – simply aren’t there. Also: I felt like portability would be a no-brainer; that I could use Dropbox and work on my sites from my laptop as well as my desktop. Why the entirety of the site data isn’t stored in or with the site folder itself is a mystery. I can pull up my entire Premiere and AfterEffects projects remotely.

I’m not seeing a proactive solution to these issues from responses in the forum, so I guess I’ll check back in with Local’s next major release. Until then…

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Same here. I can understand WP being more than 100% faster in Laravel Valet as opposed to Local, where VirtualBox and possibly Docker seem to eat CPU cycles, RAM and virtual disk space for breakfast.
However, seeing the WP backend on a basic remote site (Serverpilot on a Linode VPS in Frankfurt, 400km away) also being about twice as fast as a local site on my SSD feels a bit disappointing.

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@philby,

Are you using Faster Docker Volumes?


@mbriola,

I wrote out instructions on how to sync with Dropbox here: Using Local on multiple computers

As long as the domain is the same, there’s no reason why the Local site manifest needs to be synced.

Syncing MySQL with Dropbox is less than ideal due to conflicts that are bound to happen—even with other products like MAMP.

We totally understand the need for syncing sites. It’s something we plan on incorporating into Local Pro.

I too am noticing very slow performance using the latest version of Local by Flywheel. It seems to have just started recently. Can’t say why.

I’ve had to switch off Faster Docker Volumes because plugin, theme, and core installations, updates, activations all were failing.

Am switching off Xdebug today to see if this helps but this is very much a temporary solution as it’s a crucial part of development workflow when building themes or plugins.

Apologies for the late reply. I don’t seem to have received a notification of your reply. Anywho… I’m on Windows 10.

I’ve just updated to the latest version and it takes 17 seconds for a WordPress website page to open on the front-end, the back-end is even slower. As much as I don’t want to, I’m going to have to continue using DesktopServer.

Hi Athlone,

I understand! Thanks for your feedback!

We have things in the pipeline to drastically improve Local’s speed on Windows and have tested them, but they will take some time to implement. We’ll notify everyone when it’s available.

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Im here to chime in…Seems like Clay is the only one on the flywheel tech dept. Truly a great beta product, but this was no where near ready to roll out. My speed on bluehost dedicated server using managewp by orion is lightning quick. Its crazy to me how that is faster that information traveling 10 - 40 centimeters.

Thank you for responding to these and i know your hard a t work trying to improve this great concept.

I love the site url time limit access features, I love the templates that you can save configurations. Just 2 things I see

  1. Speed
  2. Glitches on Windows 10

Ill come back to this later - it was a good tease

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Also, facing extremely slow page load speeds on Windows 10 before and after commenting out x-debug. I put in a lot of time trying to set up this, my first local development platform. Really frustrated I spent all this time and effort and it’s so unbearably slow I can’t use it. I’ll probably just cut my losses and continue to make edits to my live site:

WP: 4.8
PHP: 5.6.20
Apache
MySQL: 5.6.3
Windows 10

I hope you are able to make some improvements as it seems like a promising project and I would like to support it.