Just wanted to jump in and say the xDebug disabling greatly improved speeds for me–on Mac with apache PHP7+ setup. Particularly on a site I was working on with WooCommerce.
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Hi Clay
First of all, thank you for the reply.
Yes please get those speed issues on Windows taken care of as for now Local is all but unusuable on a Windows machine and I will be sticking with DesktopServer until this is resolved.
Also is there a way to have an auto-login to the Admin Backend when viewing local sites? DesktopServer has a plugin to automatically login when visiting admin.
Also opting in here for a notification when the speed issues on windows are resolved…
I too, am seeing speed issues on Windows. I did get a slight improvement by changing the power management options to high performance and increasing the CPU power to minimum 80%. But it still is slower than my Vagrant VVV box and waaay slower than using my hosts staging account. I’m using the preferred environment so no Xdebug to disable.
WP: 4.8
PHP: 5.6.20
nginx
MySQL: 5.6.36
Windows 10 Enterprise 2016 LTSB
The site in question is on the larger side. DB is around 75mb, wp-content is around 1GB.
I like the simplicity of Local, ease of SSL and how quick it is to create a local tunnel, but I think I will need to stick with VVV until it can be as fast as AMPPS/XAMP.
Hi guys,
I just tweaked my local XAMPP setup a bit and the speed savings I managed to get just from:
disabling cgi_module
using 127.0.0.1 instead of localhost in wp-config.php
adding bind-address = :: to my.ini (the mysql ini settings file, at the top just under [mysqld])
Well, it’s an unbelievable difference. I’d say its about 50% faster now.
This is crazy.
12 second load time on a basic WordPress install. I was hoping the Query Monitor plugin would point me to something useful (like slow a DB) but nup, nothing.
I’ve bumped up the VM settings and I’m currently messing about in SSH to figure out why it’s so slow. This is totally unusable !
Windows 10, epic pc specs. Other VMs work super fast on same host.
Will write back if I find anything.
Hi all,
Local by Flywheel 2.0.7 is now available as a pre-release. It includes Faster Docker Volumes for Windows so you should see a visible site speed increase.
https://local.getflywheel.com/community/t/local-by-flywheel-2-0-7-pre-release/2587
hi am having problem when i click on plugins on my dashboard, i only running 3 plugins. please help what should i do? am running 4.8.1 WP and local by flywheel
I’ve been using Local 2.07 Pre-Release now for around two weeks, the one Clay mentioned above, and working on sites is only slightly faster than the previous version, but I have to say, I’m still having huge speed issues. For the particular site I’m working on, I’m at the point of spinning up a new staging server and working on that.
Any idea when the speed issues are going to be solved?
Hi Athlone,
Thanks for giving 2.0.7 a try!
Can you right-click on the site in Local and go to “Open Site SSH”?
Then, once it opens up please enter df -T and provide the output here. This command will verify that the site is using the “Faster Docker Volumes” functionality.
Are you still using localhost instead of 127.0.0.1 in your wp-config files? I have a brand new laptop and switching the DB_HOST value from localhost to 127.0.0.1 still makes a massive difference for me. I think its because Windows still has an IPv6 related bug where it incorrectly looks up the wrong IP every single time it connects if you use localhost.
@clay I think you should consider doing some tests with Windows and Local on whether localhost and 127.0.0.1 makes a considerable difference to speed (for me it does, it’s definitely quicker using 127.0.0.1) and if so change the value for Windows installs.
@clay
Did you guys get any new update regarding the speed load for Windows installs?
As per your suggestion I have tried the following:
(1) Disabling X_DEBUG by commenting out the “zend_extension” line
(2) Changing ‘localhost’ to ‘127.0.0.1’ in the wp-config.php file
(extra) I’ve also tried installing the Heartbeat plugin to increase the Heartbeat frequency from 15 to 60 seconds following this article but still, the page speed load is slower than in a MacOS install.
It did improve the speed a little bit. One admin-ajax.php request I’ve done was previously taking 8~9 seconds but now it takes 6~7 seconds. However, when I run the same request on a MacOS install, it takes no more than 2 seconds.
Few more information:
- Local version: 2.1.0
- WordPress version: 4.8.2
- PHP Version: 7.1.4
- Web Server: Apache
- MySQL Version: 5.6.34
I am also sharing here the output of the ‘df’ command:
Filesystem Type 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
none aufs 117936820 2592992 109233188 3% /
tmpfs tmpfs 2022588 0 2022588 0% /dev
tmpfs tmpfs 2022588 0 2022588 0% /sys/fs/cgroup
c/Users vboxsf 248591016 71249548 177341468 29% /app
/dev/sda1 ext4 117936820 2592992 109233188 3% /etc/hosts
shm tmpfs 65536 0 65536 0% /dev/shm
tmpfs tmpfs 2022588 0 2022588 0% /sys/firmware
Hi @gustavolee,
There’s an experimental version of Faster Docker Volumes for Windows that you can enable under Settings » Advanced with 2.0.8 and newer. It’s disabled by default.
Please note that it will create a Windows user with completely randomized credentials to make the SMB connection possible. Disabling Faster Docker Volumes will remove that user. The dependency on SMB will be removed in a future version.
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@clay this is great! I have just turned on the option you suggest and it did improve the speed a lot!
My admin-ajax.php requests were previously taking on average 8-10 seconds to load on Windows installs.
By activating the Faster Docker Volumes for Windows, the load speed went up to a good “2-3 seconds” fetch and load time.
I am sharing the output of the ‘df -T’ command after activating the Faster Docker Volumes:
Filesystem Type 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
none aufs 117936820 2592608 109233572 3% /
tmpfs tmpfs 2022588 0 2022588 0% /dev
tmpfs tmpfs 2022588 0 2022588 0% /sys/fs/cgroup
//192.168.94.1/local-flywheel cifs 248591016 85338036 163252980 35% /app
/dev/sda1 ext4 117936820 2592608 109233572 3% /etc/hosts
shm tmpfs 65536 0 65536 0% /dev/shm
tmpfs tmpfs 2022588 0 2022588 0% /sys/firmware
Seems like, different from before that used the user c/Users, it did, as you mentioned, create a Windows user (//192.168.94.1/local-flywheel).
Thank you for your support and suggestion! Much appreciated clay!
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Hi @clay,
thanks for taking the time to investigate this issue. I thought I’d chime in as I’m seeing very(!) slow performance with Local as well. System is a top-specced Dell XPS 9560 with Windows 10. Local is on version 2.1.1.
With ‘Faster Docker Volumes’ enabled and ‘XDebug’ disabled Local runs noticeably faster — but is still slow. A page refresh takes around 3 seconds or so (fresh install, no fancy scripts or massive content). Before, it would easily take 15 seconds AND -weirdly enough- make my browser unusable when opening other websites. They would either time out or give other errors.
I like Local. I like the no-fuss setup, the UI, and being able to easily switch the server config and share links. However, with the current performance penalty it’s really only barely usable for development, where waiting 3 seconds for a refresh quickly adds up.
PS: I’ve now changed DB_HOST in wp-config to ‘127.0.0.1’ and am not quite sure whether I can see an improvement. Maybe 0.1s faster, but that could be a placebo 
PPS: I’ve now set the windows power plan to ‘high performance’ instead of ‘balanced’ as per recommendation somewhere in the forum. This seems to improve the situation, I’m now at slightly over 2 seconds for a reload.
Regards,
R
I feel your pain. I just tried to use Flywheel to do a local WordPress site, and the more plugins and themes that I add the slower it seems to get. Increasing the number of CPUs and RAM for the virtualbox machine did not help at all.
I’m on Windows 10 Pro, Samsung EVO SSD 850, 12GB RAM, i7 CPU with 8 cores and this is just about unusable.
At this pace, I’ll never get this site done. I’m setting up another DigitalOcean droplet to play with. It is much, much faster than Flywheel is locally.
And, here is the odd thing… If I set up my own vm for local testing using Vmware Workstation it really flies right along. I haven’t tried setting up a vm with virtualbox, but I’ll try that now.
Maybe it’s the Docker stuff that I saw when watching the virtualbox vm load up. Is an extra layer of docker containers really needed for testing WordPress when a simple straight-forward linux vm runs so much faster?
I don’t think many of us will be running multiple instances (vms) simultaneously - so a simple straight vm might just do the trick.
Heck…maybe I’ll set up some VMs and a simple app to download them and launch them using virtualbox. Seems pretty simple.
I used to get the ol’ ~8 sec speed (just like I did with Vagrant). Then I enabled both “Faster Docker Volumes” and “IPv6 Loopback” (in Preferences > Advanced). Now I get a magically delicious 1-3 sec speed. 
Windows 10, RAM 8gb, CPU i7-3720QM 2.6ghz, moderate workload (50% to 80% of RAM capacity)
Apache, PHP 7.0.3, MySQL 5.5.55
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Hey everyone,
I know I’m resurrecting an ancient topic here but I have some great news regarding performance. 
We recently released the 
Local Lightning Public Beta which no longer utilizes virtualization. Since virtualization isn’t required, the PHP processes and web server can directly load your site files without the overhead of going through a process like Faster Docker Volumes.
It’s safe to say that everyone in this thread should see much better site performance with Lightning. 
Be sure to give it a test drive and let us know how it works for you! Best of all, you can use it side-by-side with Local by Flywheel.
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where is this located???