I’d love to dig into this more. In my mind, the first question is where the performance slowdown is happening:
- Is it happening within Local with slow click events or transitions within the Local UI?
- Is it happening within the Web browser for the actual WordPress site?
That second option is more than likely due to a specific mix of plugins and themes, so it’s hard to replicate without knowing more about an individual site. I’m happy to take a closer look and try to replicate if you can point me to an example site that I can test on.
For the first item – slowness of Local itself – I was able to replicate a bit as well as tinker with Windows settings to improve things. For reference, here’s what I did:
I have an older Dell xps 13 i5-5200U with 8.GB ram. (I think 2015 model?) It runs Linux well and a somewhat clean install of Windows eventually runs ok, but the overall OS feels sluggish to me.
One thing I noticed right away is that there was some slowness within Local when creating new sites. I was curious to see what things were going on and after opening the Task Manager and monitoring things during a new site creation, two things stood out:
SearchIndexer.exe
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According to Howo Geek, this is indexing new sites so that they are available for windows to search.
- Add exclusions to “Windows Search Settings”
msmpeng.exe
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According to Howto Geek this program looks like this is part of Windows defender and is probably scanning all of the files that are being created when a new site is created.
- Add exclusions to “Virus and Threat protection” settings.
Zooming out a bit, creating new sites does create a lot of files. Off the top of my head there are:
- All the WP files
- All the “server” files (configuration and data files for PHP/nginx/MySQL)
I went ahead and added exclusions for Local related files to both of those tools and creating a site does feel faster. That might be a good first step. Would you be able to record a screencast so that I can take a closer look and have a better idea of how to replicate the issues that you are seeing?