Running into problems with hosting service – 2
In the last post, I mentioned as to how I was running into problems with my hosting service regarding some of my blogs having performance issues, and hence being shut down by Hostmonster as causing unacceptable risks to their hosting servers. Since these were standard Wordpress Blogs, I was flummoxed as to what to do. Plus, Hostmonster support could send me some traces of the calls that were causing performance problems, and they did so, but I recognized that they would not be able to offer me comprehensive advice that could provide me solutions. I was actually in a bit of panic for some time. However, soon, rationality prevailed, and I decided to do some research as to what could be the reason for these performance issues, and use the good old Google search engine to find possible solutions.
First, the traces provided by the support staff pointed to one specific blog, and more specifically to something to do with the Comments table. I read a lot on the net as to what could be done to improve the performance, and got a lot of leads, some of which I will publish in subsequent posts. This post is geared towards 2 steps that I took that helped the problem to a large degree, and because of which, I did not see the problem again.
So what were the actions that I took ? First of all, I got in touch with Hostmonster support and convinced them to enable my access so that I could make some changes to my account. They were pretty cooperative in this process, and gave me access. Next steps:
1. I used to leave my Wordpress blogs with older versions running, and not upgrade very often. However, reading of many Wordpress optimization techniques convinced me that frequent updates is the way to go, since a newer version contains fixes that typically includes fixes for performance issues.
2. Next step was to make sure that the Akismet spam table is emptied often. I used to leave spam unattended, not emptying the spam table often. One of my blogs (the problem blog) would generate upwards of 500 spam comments per day, and at one time, I would have upto 20,000 spam comments in the table. I used to depend on the time dependent deletion of spam comments, but no longer. Now I delete the spam comments every few days, never leaving many of them in the spam comments table.
Next post will carry some additional optimization techniques.
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