The plugin installed to make the site faster was the entire reason it was slow
Cached pages returned in 0.27 seconds. Uncached ones took 24 to 46. Anyone spot-checking the homepage saw a perfectly fast site.
WooCommerce store on oversubscribed shared hosting · host load average 60–90
Measured 2026-08. The site is never named — see our policy on client anonymity below.
What changed, measured
| Measurement | Before | After | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2,000 cache writes | 703 ms | 2.5 ms | -99.6% |
| Cache files on disk | 251 MB | 0 MB | -100% |
How it actually went
A persistent object cache is only a win when the backing store is faster than regenerating the value. On oversubscribed shared disk that inverts: every one of the tens of thousands of cache writes a WooCommerce page performs becomes a disk sync.
The measurement that proves it runs in-process. Write 2,000 keys to the persistent group, then the same 2,000 to a non-persistent group, and compare. 703 milliseconds against 2.5 — a factor of 281, in the same request, on the same machine.
The page cache hid all of it. Cached pages came back in 0.27 seconds, so the homepage always looked healthy; only the cart, checkout, my-account, search and every genuine first visit were affected — which is to say, only the pages that make money.
The backing files told the same story: a 121 MB database beside a 130 MB write-ahead log that had never been checkpointed once, on storage benchmarking 5.5 ms per 8 KB write.
When a site is fast cached and catastrophically slow uncached, read wp-content/object-cache.php before anything else — and benchmark persistent against non-persistent writes before blaming the host.
Other measured jobs
276,000 autoloaded rows, loaded on every single page view
276,000 → 1,796Autoloaded options rowsStore B · 2026-09-05The “huge website” was 14% of the number the client was reading
79:1Safe reclaim vs risky reclaimStore C · 2026-09-03Zero of 261 category pages had a meta description
0 → 261Category pages with real meta copyStore D · 2026-08The database was being killed by its own configuration, every 40 minutes
19.63 GB → 1 GBInnoDB buffer pool, on a 3.8 GB serverPlans priced on the work,
not on the checklist
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