Website extremely slow / non-responsive & Internal Server Error

[ae]

After the latest LayTheme update:
My website and wp-admin are super slow
The main menu / navigation on the website doesn’t work
Sometimes an Internal Server Error is shown

This happens across Firefox and Safari, both on desktop and mobile
There is no Wordpress cache plugin

So far, I have:
Downloaded and replaced LayTheme 11.4.0
Changed PHP Version from 8.5 to 8.4
Disabled all Custom CSS
Disabled all Plugins
Restored website from an UpDraft backup
Saved Main Menu again
Saved Permalinks again
Downgraded to LayTheme 11.3.9

None of these things changed the issue.
Are there any other measurements that I might have missed?
Thanks a lot in advance.

[arminunruh]

hey, so this happened for me too sometimes when my server was simply full, so when I had so many files on my server that it really slowed down and crashed sometimes.

You could check on your web hosting dashboard if your server is full or close to being full. It's almost like when your MacBook or your PC is almost full or full. It also slows down you.

You can also check and write your webhost support and ask if that's the case.

Can you send your website address to info@laytheme.com with a link to this topic, and can you also send your WordPress admin dashboard username and password?

I haven't really changed any code that would make those performance changes.

[arminunruh]

you could for example try this to free up space:

https://laytheme.com/documentation/lay-options.html#media-cleanup

[ae]

Thank you for the quick reply! I tried the Media Cleanup feature but it results in “Scan failed.” I have also sent the requested information via e-mail.

[arminunruh]

hey, yeah, I was able to reproduce this on another side too. When the media library is quite big, the server just times out, so with the next update the scan will work in chunks to fix this.

[ae]

Wow, okay. The website doesn’t have an excessively large library though, I think. No unused media afaik and all of them optimized webp files, no videos etc.

[arminunruh]

hey Hagen!

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/eiixvpaztqls49dfuwdzg/hagen.mov?rlkey=na5duxbwjp0nirrk7re2y41s0&st=yh2nh26f&dl=0

Please check this out so as you can see, your website loads quite fast for me.

I have a question: you are probably based in Germany, right? What web host are you using? Do you know where the server of that web host is based?

So I think what's happening here is the following: LayTheme uses its own caching system called Layout Cache. Which is enabled by default since a while. I'm pretty sure you use that too.

Now, when Lay Theme updates, the cache is deleted automatically because otherwise some new Lay Theme features that are included in updates may not work.

The cache builds itself by people browsing through the website. Every time a page is visited through a link on the website, it is added to the cache.

When people first visit the website, their cache is then loaded into their JavaScript memory, so the links clicked that have already been cached will almost instantaneously load the new page.

So what happened here, I believe, is you were simply used to the very snappy loading when the layout cache was fully built.

And once you update, you see how the real loading times of your server are slower when the cache has not built fully yet.

So one solution here would be to just not update LayTheme unless there is a feature that you really want, and you can disable updating in Lay Options. Just search for "disable update" or "update" in the search box there.

Another solution for me would be to not just have a clear layout button, but have a rebuild layout cache button. I'm going to write that down as an idea.

[arminunruh]

but one thing I don't understand and don't see is the internal server error message.
Can you let me know when that message appeared and how it happened? I would like to be able to reproduce it.

[ae]

Thanks for the feedback! I am unsure about the internal server error message. It hasn’t shown up since. Perhaps it was triggered by some temporary malfunction on the end of the web host? Either way, things seem to be running smoothly again—thank you very much. (At some point, there were loading times of 20+ seconds…)

[arminunruh]

wow 20+ thats weird!