Please help: Very slow "Start Render" time

[akshayranganath]

I spoke to a few people about the Wordpress and the response I have got so far is that you need to be very careful with using plugins on wordpress. Altough they exist, not every plugin is well tuned. Moreover, if you use more than one plugin, it will be hard to know the impact of how the different plugins interact. Finally, the plugins run at the time of generating response for the user. So, it should add to the overall page response time.

I know you are hard pressed to explain the situation and slowness. One of the ways to take this further is to do the following:
1. Start with pure wordpress and no plugins. Run WPT test and note it as your benchmark metric.
2. Start to turn on the plugins one by one and see the impact. If adding a plugin improves the performance keep it. Else disable it.

It is a trial and error situation - but, I think it will at least help you narrow down on the plugin that is causing performance issues.