A Failed WordPress 3.2.1 Upgrade Due To GLACIAL Slowness

Wordpressorg2011 Well, my Friday evening didn’t work out as planned. I was all ready to get this whole blogs.voxeo.com site moved over to WordPress 3.2.1. I’ve been running WP 3.2.1 on some of my personal sites (and the VOIPSA blog) and it’s been working great. Given my positive experience, I expected there to be no problems and was looking forward to it “just working”.

FAIL!

Some four hours later after numerous restorations and reattempts at upgrading while making various changes in between, I had to finally give in and admit defeat. I’ve had to keep the site at the latest 3.1.x release.

Why?

Because post-3.2.1 upgrade, the site admin interface was completely unusable. The upgrade would appear to work perfectly fine – and the blog posts would display perfectly fine… but then when it would go back to the admin dashboard it was g… l… a… c… i… a… l… l… y… … s… l… o… w….

So slow, in fact, that I never could really get to the “Upgrade Network” page to even finish the full installation.

I tried everything… I disabled plugins… I mucked around with themes… I made sure the base operating system was all set… I checked the master list of WordPress 3.2.1 problems… I spent a large block of time searching the WordPress forums for an answer…

… and in the end, it turns out I am not alone – a number of other people are reporting similar slowness. In fact, a good number of other people judging by the number of new forum posts featuring the words “3.2.1 slow”.

Judging from some of the posts, my guess at the moment is that perhaps there is some interaction between WordPress and the “Voxeo” theme we use on most of the blogs here. Our theme is, in fact, quite ancient in terms of WordPress… we developed it over 3.5 years ago based off of the old venerable Kubrick theme… and so perhaps that is causing problems. However, I have neither the time nor interest right now in coming up with a new theme… although maybe that will be the way forward.