Comments on: Blog-Site Performance Issues

By: Scot

Scot — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 12:30:42 +0000

DF: Done!

Be advised, customizations that I make to the WordPress Theme are sometimes lost later. I’ve already experienced this before.

– Scot

By: DF

DF — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 03:19:49 +0000

Any chance that the date of the entry can be displayed with the title of the entry.

By: Scot

Scot — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 01:01:34 +0000

Frank, everyone seems to think that everything about sending a newsletter is easy, but it’s not. “Staging” the delivery of the newsletter is a big deal that would cost me a lot of time and aggravation. While I understand that it sounds like a logical step, it’s not even a realistic option.

By: Frank

Frank — Sun, 09 Dec 2007 12:29:35 +0000

Scot, a simpler, first step would be to stage the delivery of the announcement email. Send it out in four, five, six different groups separated by an hour or two. I don’t think many people would be ticked to find out someone else read it a few hours before they had the chance. Well, the “first post” newbies maybe.

By: Scot

Scot — Sat, 08 Dec 2007 14:45:41 +0000

The problems only occur during the first hour or two after the newsletter mails, when the blog experiences peak demand from hundreds and possibly thousands of concurrent users. The same thing happened with the last mailing of the newsletter in October — although to a far less degree. I think that one may have gone out at night, which probably minimized the number of concurrent sessions.

I’ve just installed and enabled a WordPress add-on called WP-Cache 2. It has already cached the main pages, rss feeds, searches, and all the most recent blog posts and is now working its way back through the whole site.

It’s not clear to me that this will completely eliminate the problem. I guess we won’t know until the next newsletter goes out. But I think this software solution is worth a try. It’s supposed to serve a lot more concurrent users and also improve the performance of the site by serving key parts of the site out of cache folder instead of making calls to the database.

WordPress does have basic caching functionality, although it’s turned off by default and is fully manual in how it’s configured. WP-Cache also gives me manual options for including or excluding specific pages. One way or another, i think the site will be improved by this code and judicious management of it.

Meanwhile I’m exploring other webhosts. A friend of mine recommended a low cost host with “semi-dedicated” (shared hosting with far fewer other customers on the same box). But the issue is really the concurrent MySQL connections, something that most hosts don’t even list among their specs. So now I’m asking that question of prospective hosts.

– Scot

By: ExF15AIS

ExF15AIS — Sat, 08 Dec 2007 12:54:44 +0000

I am relieved to hear that the delay appears technical in nature. I one of those who work in the city but choose to reside in the rural areas (housing is a killer); and with that choice there is a price to pay. There is no broadband, no DSL, no fixed-based wireless, and too many trees for satellite feeds, so I am relegated to only having dial-up or a couple of tin cans and string.

Needless to say, it was painful that the text-based went away in lieu of HTML, scripts, data mining, etc. But that is how technology is I guess. No discredit to you; but it is a little reminiscent of your blog on “Windows XP or Vista?” where more is added to the system with little to no improvement; but that’s just a dial-uppers rant.

Hope all resolved soon.

By: Scot

Scot — Sat, 08 Dec 2007 11:54:40 +0000

Good point, Alexgieg. There is third-party cache add-on that I should look at again. When I looked at it originally, it hadn’t been updated for my WP version. But maybe it has now.

I discovered from my webhost, though, that I’m limited to 60 simultaneous MySQL connections, and that apparently combines both the forums and the blog, even though they’re in separate databases.

I’m definitely going to try the cache option, if possible. But if anyone knows of a webhost with robust MySQL support, please post the name.

By: alexgieg

alexgieg — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 19:11:23 +0000

Are you using the cache mechanisms available for script-based websites? I don’t know the details, but I remember there are ways to minimize the hits on the database by caching a content that doesn’t change frequently.

I also remember that, when I tried TypePad (it’s been 1.5 year), it allowed you to set a mixed mode in which some pages would be generated as purely static content while others would stay dynamic. I don’t know whether WordPress has this feature too, but it’s worth checking, since then you’d also hit the database less frequently.

By: bk58

bk58 — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 15:25:40 +0000

I ditto Tiktaalik

By: Martin

Martin — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 15:19:10 +0000

I experienced the site as totally unavailable yesterday. It’s too bad WordPress doesn’t have a way to build a pure HTML image of the site pages.

By: Tiktaalik

Tiktaalik — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 15:04:31 +0000

Maybe the Slashdot effect was a one time thing. For example, I’ll rarely, if ever again, access the blog content from the email announcement. If there are enough of us like that, we’ll have already accessed all the posts between email days.