How it works
- Makes WP_Query lightning fast (0.4 seconds uncached vs over 180 seconds for 820,000 products on /shop/ page)
- Works by optimising your underlying database and queries and eliminating table scans
- Provides options to alter or remove slow WooCommerce and WordPress features
- Complements caching systems perfectly
- Speeds up SLOW queries – install the Query Monitor plugin and view your slowest pages, if you see slow queries being reported, Scalability Pro will help. If you instead see thousands of queries occurring, there is a separate solution for that type of performance problem.
- It adds indexes to your key WordPress tables to help optimise underlying SQL queries
- It alters database queries to make them more efficient, avoiding table scans
- It provides options to disable, alter or microcache slow WordPress/WooCommerce/Import functionality
If Scalability Pro is implemented and there are still table scans occurring, we will fix them.
Table of Contents
Three-pronged approach to real scalability
Scalability Pro works best in conjunction with Redis object caching and a good quality hosting stack. Any one of these on their own is not enough. If too many queries (over 1000) are being registered in Query Monitor when you have Redis activated, then the related plugin is not using an object cache. If this is the case, you should contact the plugin author and tell us too. We can advise them on how to fix their plugin to scale properly with good use of the object cache. If you’re still seeing slow queries, as opposed to too many queries, then Scalability Pro has missed something — please let us know and we’ll endeavour to get it fixed.
Five problem areas for Scalability
Slow queries as your site gets bigger – this is what Scalability Pro helps with. It makes slow queries run quickly when your site is bigger.
Too many queries – the Redis object cache helps with this, unless the plugin author has not implemented object-caching support
Too much RAM and CPU consumption in PHP – you’ll see low SQL time, low numbers of queries, but long page generation time and large RAM usage. You’ll probably find some queries that return large row counts, often over 5000 rows returned or more. These plugins are filling objects with those 5000 rows every page load. Normally, this can be fixed by implementing an object cache – but it depends on the type of data.
Slow API calls – your site may be using ajax, or it may be calling third-party APIs. This is especially true when an admin is logged in, and especially so on the dashboard and the plugins page and especially so if you have unlicensed plugins that keep trying to update themselves.
Poor hosting – make sure you get a good quality hosting stack. PHP 7, MySQL 8, nginx, fastcgi_cache or some kind of http accelerator, redis in-memory-only and a proper configuration.
A note about Table Scans and Page Caching
WordPress has many occasions where table scans occur against the database. For example, the Price Filter causes a table scan to obtain the maximum and minimum price range and means your page is reading every item in your database to gather this information. When you only have a few hundred products in your WooCommerce store, you would never notice. But once you get to a few thousand or tens or hundreds of thousands this becomes dreadful for your server.
Page Caching helps – especially if you can implement it at the Nginx or Varnish level. But still, when you have a huge site, you cannot cache everything, so your site still needs to be fast for newly generated pages.
This is why eliminating Table Scans is fundamental to solving your WordPress scalability issues. Instead of reading every item in the database, well written queries read only the 20 items they need to read in order to present 20 items on page.
