# Increased server response time since upgrading to Ghost 4 - Degraded performance **URL:** \ **Category:** Developer help\ **Created:** [March 20, 2021, 12:23pm UTC](https://forum.ghost.org/t/increased-server-response-time-since-upgrading-to-ghost-4-degraded-performance/21004 "2021-03-20T12:23:28Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 2\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![anon4572339](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/c77e96/32.png) [@anon4572339](https://forum.ghost.org/u/anon4572339)\ **Post date:** [March 20, 2021, 12:23pm UTC](https://forum.ghost.org/t/increased-server-response-time-since-upgrading-to-ghost-4-degraded-performance/21004/1 "2021-03-20T12:23:28Z")
I’m a long time user of Ghost on my own Digital Ocean droplet. I have recently upgraded to the latest version. I have noticed a significant, up to 2-second delay in the initial server response time when visiting my blog (url below). When I still ran Ghost 3 the response times were swift and great as always, but now every full refresh of the page as an end user, my client waits anywhere between 2-3 seconds for the initial response. As I’m not so good in troubleshooting exactly what is going on, I wanted to ask here if since the last big update to Ghost 4 there could be some changes affecting the performance of the initial response? I’ve restarted ghost multiple times, rebooted the Digital Ocean droplet which has been running my blog for the past two years, and I’ve also separately restarted Nginx, but the sluggish performance persists. Is there anyone else experiencing similar performance degradation? The speed of initial load is very important for me and this is why I am asking. I thank you for your thoughts already in advance. URL: [www.lostbookofsales.com](http://www.lostbookofsales.com) I’ve Installed and upgraded everything with the Ghost-CLI ---
**Author:** ![Kevin](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/flex015/user_avatar/forum.ghost.org/kevin/32/32_2.png) [@Kevin](https://forum.ghost.org/u/Kevin)\ **Post date:** [March 20, 2021, 8:20pm UTC](https://forum.ghost.org/t/increased-server-response-time-since-upgrading-to-ghost-4-degraded-performance/21004/2 "2021-03-20T20:20:03Z")
4.0 increased performance but there has been a regression in 4.1.0 due to unexpected behaviour of the database library we use, it’s being tracked here: > > > \### Issue Summary > > Hello there! First of all thanks for Ghost 4, looks super n…ice so far. Great work. > > I'm reporting a concern I have after upgrading from a self-hosted version of Ghost 3 (latest) to Ghost 4, where page rendering performance has severely degraded. > > While, w/ V3, pages rendered in less than 200ms and did not show much CPU activity on \`htop\`, now that I am running Ghost V4, pages take much longer to render (2-3 seconds), and I can clearly see 1 CPU core at 100% for the same time it takes to render the page, as reported by \`htop\`. That 100% comes from the NodeJS process running Ghost, and not MySQL nor blocking disk I/O. > > Note that pages render fine, and nothing looks broken. They just take x10 the time they took to render in Ghost V3. > > Also, this slowdown only seem to affect pages that contain posts as well as pages listing posts. Simple pages (non-posts) seem to be as fast as before (millisecond range). > > I'm using a theme that is rather lightweight and standard (not doing much templating work), and migrated it over to Ghost V4 full compatibility (no warnings nor errors are being reported by GScan). > > Note that I am running Ghost on an ARM CPU, which is obviously not as fast as server Intel Xeon CPUs, but a x10 performance degradation makes me wonder something could be optimized, and even show gains for Ghost V4 instances running on traditional Intel CPUs. > > As poor performance impacts SEO, I'm concerned that this negatively impacts the position in Google of a lot of Ghost blogs that just migrated to V4. > > \### To Reproduce > > \- Measure page rendering performance in Ghost V3 (in my case: ~200ms on an ARM core) > \- Upgrade from Ghost V3 to Ghost V4 > \- Measure page rendering performance in Ghost V4 (takes x10 time on the same ARM core) > > \### Technical details: > > \* Ghost Version: \`v4.1.0\` > \* Node Version: \`v10.23.0\` > \* Browser/OS: Firefox on macOS > \* Database: \`mysql Ver 15.1 Distrib 10.3.27-MariaDB, for debian-linux-gnueabihf (armv8l) using readline 5.2\`