Slow Blog Issue

Hey Ben,

Changing the theme would only be temporary, just to see if the default theme would load any quicker for you. Just 1 step in the troubleshooting process. If you still can't (or won't) do it, even for 3 minutes to test it out, there is no real way to tell if it is the theme, the server, the plugins, the content, etc...

As for WP-Optimize, I am not sure exactly what it does. I mean, I realize it runs some sort of optimization algorithms, but not sure of the exacts and specifics, so, I would still strongly recommend trying to use the Optimize function directly within your phpMyAdmin.

If you can try either (or both preferably) and then post back here with the results, we can attempt to help you 'investigate' further if need be.

I love all this poorly written code, cause all the gurus promote outsourcing to the cheapest bidders. Really makes me laugh some times.

Is there anybody who I could hire to work on this for me?

I read about half the replies and skipped to posting, so I apologize if this is redundant.

The problem may not be MySQL or WordPress at all.

I have a WP install running a network of sites. It's an autoblog with about approx. 50 blogs in the network, each automatically posting approx. 20 post a day. Google liked it and so my traffic climbed to around 300 hits a day back in Oct.

At that point the site spent more time down than up. First, it got really slow. Then it got slower. Then it got so slow as to only show error messages. Then my hosting starting complaining that my VPS was bringing down the whole server and crashing other people's sites. Problems galore.

As the site was getting slower and slower and slower (but before it started to crash other sites) I started asking my hosting company for tech support on how to fix the problem. First, we moved the DB to another VPS. Then we optimized the DB - they suggested only doing so once a month or so but the optimization function took only a few seconds and I was getting a lot of SPAM comments (which when deleted tend to make your tables less than optimized) so I run the optimization every 24 hours.

I even paid them - twice - to optimize the site. Still no luck. I moved the site to MediaTemple where their automated tools could tell me how much processor each call to the site was using. I found that there were a lot 404 errors tying up a lot of resources. I also found out - via MT's tech support - that WP Unique ties up a lot of processor cycles and takes a long time. (I love WP Unique and use it everywhere but after this I started looking at the code and it is very inefficient IMHO. With about 4 hours of tweaking I reduced the process time to about 20% of the original time and have implemented my hack/klooge/bandaid on a couple of domains.)

I finally had to move the site a dedicated server. This fixed the problem so well that Google started sending me almost twice the traffic and then the problems returned. The dedicated server is a dual core intel with 4 GB RAM running a LAMP server. It really shouldn't have resource problems at my traffic levels so I started really digging into the logs and found lots of what looked like script kiddies trying to break into MySQL and PHPMYADMIN. Also, I was seeing a lot of 404 errors from the same IP... So I assumed I was being attacked via some form of denial of service.

I installed a new Apache module - Spamhaus - which accomplished nothing. This suggested to me that the problem wasn't the attack type I thought it was if an attack was the issue at all. So I set up a cron job to restart Apache every few hours. The site seems to be stable and quick for a couple of hours at a time so the cron job could keep the site up most of the time. However, this obviously isn't an ideal solution.

I eventually found some recommended settings for Apache from Linnode. I was worried these would limit several aspects of Apache. However, I have yet to see any issues what so ever with the settings. My site is not limited in any way that I have found, it is never down, I've never been denied a page when I went looking, and it is very fast now. The problem may not be MySQL or WordPress at all but the default Apache settings in combination with people messing with your site.

Thought I'd throw it out there since this long post is the culmination of about 2 months worth of banging my head against a wall and it might just save you a lot of time. Here are the settings I changed in my /etc/apache2/apache2.conf - I run Ubuntu if you are running something else the file may be somewhere else:

<IfModule mpm_prefork_module>
# Original Settings
# StartServers 5
# MinSpareServers 5
# MaxSpareServers 10
# MaxClients 150
# MaxRequestsPerChild 0
StartServers 1
MinSpareServers 3
MaxSpareServers 6
ServerLimit 24
MaxClients 24
MaxRequestsPerChild 3000
</IfModule>

Here is the MySQL command for optimizing a DB:
/usr/bin/mysqlcheck -o -v -u { { User } } -p{ { Password } } { { DB } }
Obviously replace anything that includes { { and } }. (There is no space btwn -p and the password.)