After having installed everything on the brand new VBOX4, I still struggled with one problem: My WordPress dashboard was extremely slow and would take several minutes to load. The same was the case for publishing and updating posts. Everything else was smooth as butter. Some searching around on the internet showed that some people was having the same issue, but of course no one managed to come up with a solution that worked for me.

The usual suspects when something weird is happening in WordPress are the installed plugins, so I started to disable them one by one. It turned out the culprit was WP-Piwik, a plugin used in conjunction with the popular open source analytics platform Piwik. That disabling WP-Piwik helped sure was weird and it wasn’t entirely clear to me from the available plugin settings what could cause the annoying slowness. One thing stood out, though: The plugin reported that cURL had to be installed to get access to all the “expert settings”. Could it be that the missing cURL package was the problem? I was pretty sure I had it installed on VBOX3.

So I installed the php5-curl package and restarted Apache:

sudo apt-get install php5-curl
sudo service apache2 restart

And what do you know, the WordPress dashboard started to load immediately again. So if you’re also sitting around for minutes waiting for the dashboard to load and posts to be published and updated, installing php5-curl might just be the the piece you’re missing in your WordPress puzzle.