Improving a query using a lot of inner joins to wp

Question

am working with a wordpress website that is performing the following query, but I see this query is doing many inner joins and the website takes long to load and goes down a lot, and I have been trying to create a query that produces the same result but with no success yet

I would like to know what could be a better way to do this

SELECT *
FROM wp_posts
INNER JOIN wp_postmeta color ON wp_posts.ID = color.post_id 
INNER JOIN wp_postmeta transmission ON wp_posts.ID = transmission.post_id 
INNER JOIN wp_postmeta model ON wp_posts.ID = model.post_id 
INNER JOIN wp_postmeta brand ON wp_posts.ID = brand.post_id 

AND color.meta_key = 'color' 
AND color.meta_value = 'red' 
AND transmission.meta_key = 'transmission' 
AND transmission.meta_value = 'auto' 
AND model.meta_key = 'model' 
AND model.meta_value = 'model' 
AND brand.meta_key = 'brand' 
AND brand.meta_value = 'brand'

AND wp_posts.post_status = 'publish'
AND wp_posts.post_type = 'car'
ORDER BY wp_posts.post_title

Here's the explain output.

+----+-------------+-----------+--------+-----------------------------+----------+---------+------------------------+------+----------------------------------------------+
| id | select_type | table         | type   | possible_keys               | key      | key_len | ref                          | rows | Extra                                        |
+----+-------------+-----------+--------+-----------------------------+----------+---------+------------------------+------+----------------------------------------------+
|  1 | SIMPLE      | color         | ref    | post_id,meta_key            | meta_key | 768     | const                        |  629 | Using where; Using temporary; Using filesort |
|  1 | SIMPLE      | wp_posts      | eq_ref | PRIMARY,type_status_date,ID | PRIMARY  | 8       | tmcdb.color.post_id          |    1 | Using where                                  |
|  1 | SIMPLE      | brand         | ref    | post_id,meta_key            | post_id  | 8       | tmcdb.wp_posts.ID            |    4 | Using where                                  |
|  1 | SIMPLE      | transmission  | ref    | post_id,meta_key            | post_id  | 8       | tmcdb.color.post_id          |    4 | Using where                                  |
|  1 | SIMPLE      | model         | ref    | post_id,meta_key            | post_id  | 8       | tmcdb.transmission.post_id   |    4 | Using where                                  |
+----+-------------+-----------+--------+-----------------------------+----------+---------+------------------------+------+----------------------------------------------+

Wordpress schema here.

Answer 1

Speeding up wp_postmeta is detailed here: http://mysql.rjweb.org/doc.php/index_cookbook_mysql#speeding_up_wp_postmeta

And Why are references to wp_postmeta so slow?

Answer 2

To resolve performance issue with 10+ joins SQL queries on innodb tables using utf8 charset, create a new index on postmeta :

Backup database first. Reduce [wp_]postmeta.meta_key length to 191 to avoid "Specified key was too long; max key length is 767 bytes" error.

ALTER TABLE wp_postmeta MODIFY meta_key VARCHAR(191);

Create index

CREATE INDEX wpm_ix ON wp_postmeta (post_id, meta_key);