Slow site with ~1,000 blog posts?

1

I deleted ~1,000 blog posts for a few hours and then restored them.

As you can see, the site speeds up significantly when the posts are removed:

Screenshot 2025-06-21 at 11.12.12
Screenshot 2025-06-21 at 11.12.12911×294 26.8 KB

Is this the expected behavior? Anything I can do to speed up the site while keeping the ~1,000 posts?

2

@superhua, Without knowing what you are measuring, it’s hard to tell if your site is showing expected behaviour. Please provide us more information about the request you are measuring.

Btw, did you have a chance to read the docs on Permance & Caching?

3

Thank you.

The graph is from Uptime Kuma and displays a simple response time.

I’ve read the Performance and Caching material and am using the default caching.

From system.yaml:

cache:
  enabled: true
  check:
    method: file
  driver: auto
  prefix: g
  purge_at: '0 4 * * *'
  clear_at: '0 3 * * *'
  clear_job_type: standard
  clear_images_by_default: true
  cli_compatibility: false
  lifetime: 604801
  gzip: true
  allow_webserver_gzip: false
  redis:
    socket: null
    password: null
    database: null
    server: null
    port: null
  memcache:
    server: null
    port: null
  memcached:
    server: null
    port: null
twig:
  cache: true
  debug: false
  auto_reload: true
  autoescape: false
  undefined_functions: true
  undefined_filters: true
  safe_functions: {  }
  safe_filters: {  }
  umask_fix: false

and

flex:
  cache:
    index:
      enabled: true
      lifetime: 60
    object:
      enabled: true
      lifetime: 600
    render:
      enabled: true
      lifetime: 600

An older post suggests that 1,000 pages was the limit. However, with Grav 1.7+, this doesn’t seem like an issue. (We’re on Grav 1.7.48.)

I’m trying to figure out why removing these posts would have such a marked difference in the responsiveness of the site.

4

@superhua,

The graph is from Uptime Kuma and displays a simple response time.

Again, still not sure what kind of request you are measuring…

Anyway, I did my own benchmark:

  • Cheap $500 laptop running Windows 11 with WSL (Ubuntu).
  • Installed a fresh Blog Site skeleton inside WSL.
  • Created 1000 copies of blog item the-urban-jungle using the following script:
    for f in {1..1000}
do
   mkdir "user/pages/01.blog/blog-item$f"
   cat "user/pages/01.blog/the-urban-jungle/item.md" > "user/pages/01.blog/blog-item$f/item.md"
done
  • Cleared cache: $ bin/grav cache
  • In browser, I opened page http://blog-dev (which opens page /user/pages/01.blog), which has the following frontmatter:
    content:
  items: '@self.children'
  limit: 6
  order:
      by: date
      dir: desc
  pagination: true
  url_taxonomy_filters: true
pagination: true
  • Request time: 2.18 sec
  • Moving to another page though pagination : http://blog-dev/page:87
  • Request time: 1.01 sec

As said, I’m not sure what your request is about…

1 Like
5

is it 4-5 sec when have 1000 pages ? if it measures ping like sending signal and taking back a response and calculates time spent between two, that is too much i think. it would be normal if it was total of all 1000 pages maybe since it will be like 4 ms for each. if that is the case i wouldnt use that app all time because it would effect performance with not equal benefit imo, just testing like you do would be good.
if it is a page’s loading time, i dont think 1000 pages should effect each other since they should be cached separately.
as @pamtbaau said, we would like to have more information, have a nice day :slight_smile:

7

Thanks for taking the time to do that!

Your results are solid; I’ll need to keep digging on my end to see what is causing the slow down.

The request that Uptime Kuma measures is the server response time / the HTTP request for the site. I’m not sure of the details beyond that :slightly_smiling_face:, but the site definitely slows down when there are many blog posts present.

Thanks again.

8

@superhua, It would be helpful if you could provide more information:

  • What kind of page is being measured? Default, blog, modular?
  • What is its frontmatter?
  • Which plugins are you running?
    • What happens when you disable all plugins that are not installed by default?
  • Which theme are you running?
    • What happens if your use the default Quark theme?
  • …