WP2.0 admin dashboard slow as molasses
I was consistently getting 30-second load times for the WordPress admin ‘dashboard’, which is totally unacceptable. I decided to actually try and fix this, first by searching around a bit, and found for example this thread which is other users complaining as well, but mostly about WP1.5. After some experimentation (about 5 minutes at most), I discovered it was the “Planet WordPress” RSS feed pulling that was causing the big delay. Commenting that out gets me consistently sub-100ms for rendering (I’m assuming the other feeds it pulls are cached at that point.) Nice. Anyhow, if you want to do the same thing, there’s two ways to do it that are fairly simple with quick changes to wp-admin/index.php:
- Comment out the line (#146 in mine) that reads $rss = @fetch_rss(’http://planet.wordpress.org/feed/’);or
- (This works better, IMO, even thought the code looks like it should work fine with #1 above) Comment out the entire section for Planet WordPress updates. I.e., stick a “/*” at line 146, and a “*/” around line 165 (just after the closing curly brace).
Absolutely, positively, in 2.x of WP, I’d love to see the dashboard content be controllable by options in the admin section.