Long time user of Local, but never got Lightning to work well for me as it was too slow on Windows 10. So gave up and went back to Local. I remember spending hours going through the threads and trying all the “fixes”, restarting my machine and nothing making much of a difference.
Well, it’s 2021 and let’s try new things, right? I’d sort of rather not go down that rabbit hole again. Anybody on Windows 10 wanna chime in and let me know if Lightning is working well for you comparatively to how Local used to work? If I know it is possible it will give me faith! Thanks.
P.S. I have updated lightning and taken a click through of a site. The performance still seems quite slow.
Never used the old Local, but the current Local is definitely still quite slow. It’s somewhat workable (loading times of 3-4s) but definitely very, very frustrating.
If I ever have some spare time to explore and try out other tools I’ll probably look for alternatives, but for now it is just fast enough that I’m sticking with it. (they definitely won’t turn me into a paying customer like this though…)
@jonaskuske thanks for taking the time to reply. Yeah, 3 - 4 seconds a click would drive me crazy. I used to do more custom coded themes. These days, I’ve been doing more Elementor and a slow admin with theme builder would drive me nuts. This is where I notice the slow down in Lightning.
Maybe I will stick to the old Local until it is so out of date it is unusable.
Happy to report that I managed to fix the problem, at least for my setup!
TL;DR:
Replaced MariaDB with MySQL 8 and applied these changes, now pages load in 450ms and the REST API responds in 120ms.
Had to do work on an older project and noticed that it loaded much, much faster than my current one. After lots of debugging and updating the environment of the newer project to match the old one, I determined that the database was the problem – the newer project used MariaDB to more closely align with the production setup, the old one used MySQL 8. Unfortunately you can’t hotswap databases, so I needed to zip my project folder and reimport it into Local, this time choosing MySQL as database.
And indeed: switching from MariaDB to MySQL 8 reduced the loading times from 3.5s down to a bearable 1.2s!
Next, I applied the changes from the “Optimizing Local “Lightning” performance on Windows 10” thread to my project. Not sure if the opcache changes improved anything (if so, then by a couple ms at most), but disabling the xdebug extension further improved loading times and got them down to 450ms! (sometimes 900ms on first load, I guess because there’s no cache yet, but oh my…)
Even better, responses from the REST API now only take 120ms – previously they took 3-4s like the slow page loads, which really affected my project because it takes advantage of this API a lot.
