Running Wordpress 4.1 on a CentOS 6.5 instance through VirtualBox as a dev server. When logged in as admin on both ssl and non-ssl sites Wordpress curl requests are taking a long time to run (45+ seconds overall before page loads). This renders my dev site unusable, as you can imagine.

While browsing around I found many people complaining of this extremely slow curl issue and I've discovered that setting the WP_INSTALLING constant to true speeds the site up 100%. I imagine it blocks all outgoing requests?

What are the consequences of setting this? I see that it breaks my front-end (admin side works well).

define('WP_INSTALLING', true);

Or, How can I just disable all outgoing requests? I profiled the page load and it appears that 65% of the hanging is due to curl requests. I just want to disable these external checks.

Running Wordpress 4.1 on a CentOS 6.5 instance through VirtualBox as a dev server. When logged in as admin on both ssl and non-ssl sites Wordpress curl requests are taking a long time to run (45+ seconds overall before page loads). This renders my dev site unusable, as you can imagine.

While browsing around I found many people complaining of this extremely slow curl issue and I've discovered that setting the WP_INSTALLING constant to true speeds the site up 100%. I imagine it blocks all outgoing requests?

What are the consequences of setting this? I see that it breaks my front-end (admin side works well).

define('WP_INSTALLING', true);

Or, How can I just disable all outgoing requests? I profiled the page load and it appears that 65% of the hanging is due to curl requests. I just want to disable these external checks.

• customization
• constants

• 3 Did you try define('WP_HTTP_BLOCK_EXTERNAL', true); – Wyck Commented Jan 13, 2015 at 17:58
• 1 Please add your comment as an answer and I'll accept it. That was exactly what I needed. I didn't know that constant exists. Thanks! – adamgedney Commented Jan 13, 2015 at 18:50
• Telling WordPress that it is installing an update seems an odd way to improve performance, for sure! – Matty J Commented Mar 3, 2016 at 22:09

1 Answer 1

I want to credit @wyck for his answer of setting:

define( 'WP_HTTP_BLOCK_EXTERNAL', true );

I also just wanted to add that this and a lot of nice other config options are nicely documented in the Codex.