The upload speed is fine. It is not until it reaches the final stage that the lag occurs. This may well be linked to the size of the site as it used to be fine.

My experience is that the upload actually take place nearly as quick as FileZilla but that the "update remote manifest" takes forever. So, one can cancel the upload during "update remote manifest" and all is well. 

The question is how important is "update remote manifest"?  Does it do anything useful?  Can you skip it?

It's never done me any harm to cancel.  I usually let it run to completion later on, when it is convenient for me.  I've never found anyone who can tell me why it would be important to do the "updating remote manifest".  It seems clear to me that you don't need to do it every time you update your site.  So if you are worried, do it when have the time.

By the way, I have a very large site .. about 5000 images and hundreds of pages. It takes "updating remote manifest" about an hour to run.

On your host server you will see a file named WebPlusDb.txt. My undertsanding is that WP uses this file to decide which files need uploading when you update (incremental update) or add a new page to your site. Over time this file seems to become somewhat bloated - when I looked at mine a few days ago it was something like 14Mb - and the update becomes ever more time consuming. My workaround is to periodically rename WebPlusDb.txt as WebPlusDb.old. (This is a backup in case anything goes wrong.)

WebPlusDb.txt no longer exists on the server so WP rebuilds it progressively as you make changes or additions to your site. My current manifest file size is just over 800 bytes as I've only made a few changes to the website. The downside is that an incremental update will effectively be a full update first time round but the gain is that the manifest update is almost instantaneous.

Hope this helps.

Yes, that should do the trick.

The remote manifest file is shown at the foot of the window in Maintain Website. I have attempted to amend the file extension but it will not do it. Before I do anything that might be reckless (given my lack of knowledge on these things) would it work if I deleted the entire file and then replace it with the 'Old' extension version?

In that case Alfred, could I just delete the contents of the manifest folder, do a full upload, and therefore speed up future updating of the manifest?

What I want to achieve Alfred is to prevent the time it is taking for the remote manifest to update each time I upload something. GWYNDY suggested amending the WebPlusDb.txt file to  WebPlusDb.Old in order that webplus would not have to search through lots of previous files to do the update. The downside he said was that the next upload would effectively be a full upload, but the new WebPlusDb.txt file would be empty and therefore update faster.

The problem that I hit was finding a way to amend the WebPlusDb.txt file. I tried to change it in the Maintain file section but it would not permit me to amend the file extension. I just want to avoid a 10 minute plus wait every time I upload even the smallest file.

I hope that explains it.

Hi Alfred

I have managed to change the extension to '.old' in the cpanel as that had an option to rename the file. However, when I enter Maintain website in WebPlus, the file still shows as '.txt'. Does this mean that when I upload, a new .txt file will be created which is empty? I assume it would.

Thank you Alfred. I would not necessarily have expected you to get back to me yesterday as I am sure you have other things to do besides staring at the forum waiting for people like me to pose questions. I am grateful for any response, however long it takes.