Yesterday, I posted about how easy it is to install WordPress using Azure.
However, after configuring the App Service and installing WordPress... and setting it to the Korea region to test...
What? What is this... it's really slow beyond imagination..
What is this.. I thought I might have done something wrong, so I tried setting it up with higher specs and messing around with this and that.. but it's still slow.
So, I used https://www.webpagetest.org/, which is widely used for site page loading tests, to run a test.
Even though I talk a lot, anyway, the point is.. it's slow.. very slow. The perceived performance is very slow.
I set up the same theme and WordPress settings on my cheap Namecheap hosting and ran the tests. It's a very cheap WordPress hosting that can be built for less than $5 a month, but it is much faster than the WordPress site set up on Azure in most speed aspects..
Also, I tested with https://gtmetrix.com/, which is widely used for page speed measurement.
Of course, the location of the test server was Hong Kong (the closest test server to Korea) .. but surprisingly, the grade was an 'F' grade. It was a shocking result.
Tested with the same settings on Namecheap WordPress hosting.
Can't say it's fast, but the results were much more pleasant. In fact, during actual testing, the perceived performance seemed to have a difference of about F and C.
Why is this happening?
I'm not entirely sure yet, but after reading posts where users on Reddit are complaining about similar issues, it seems that building WordPress on Azure App Service is slow because, when using App Service, a separate database server is not built within the same server host.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AZURE/comments/simucy/wordpress_on_azure_app_service_linux_extremely/
https://serverfault.com/questions/1091546/very-slow-mysql-on-azure-app-service-w-php-wordpress
Additionally, it is said that the response speed is quite slow when loading plugins in PHP on Azure App Service; I am not sure if this is a DB issue.
Anyway, it seems to be in such bad condition that it's unusable. I don't know why this isn't mentioned in the official documentation... Maybe everyone is setting it up as a VM and doesn't know about this issue.. (though it seems much better in terms of price too)