Make Money from Blogs » Problems

Optimizing your WordPress account – 2

ashish — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 18:09:48 +0000

A few weeks back, I had written about how to take some basic steps towards optimizing your WordPress account. Imagine what would happen if more people started promoting your WordPress Blog, or wonders of wonders, it appears on the front page of Digg or Slashdot. In such cases, unless you have optimized your WordPress configuration already, you can be pretty much sure that your account will get to a state where the server is not able to handle the load, and will shut down; further if your account is on a shared server, you might have some uncomfortable queries from your host.
So, here are some points on how to optimize your account:
1. Since WordPress works on a database system, it pulls every bit of content from the server. If there are a large number of requests for your blog, your server has to make that many DB queries to fetch the content. This puts a lot of stress on your server. User a Super Cache plugin to Cache some of the load and serve static HTML files instead of querying the DB (link to plugin, and page).
2. When you serve various files such as binaries, videos, images, scripts, etc from your server, it becomes slow. Place them on other servers, so that the load on your server is reduced. For example, you can get videos from Youtube and Photos from Flickr, and also, you can even hire some hosting space on another server or on a service such as Amazon S3 for this purpose.
3. If you are more advanced, look at your server logs; it may be possible to determine multiple requests from a bot or script that is of no good, blocking these may make your server behave a bit better
4. Look to get stats on how your web page is loading. If it takes a lot of time to load your page, there may be a lot of plugins working, or scripts loading, and so on. Some tools you can use for this purpose are – LiveHTTPHeaders (link, displays the HTTP headers), Firebug (link, Look at loading times for various artifacts on a page),
5. Inside your wp-config.php file, remove some of the DB calls that are not necessary. For example, hard-code your Template Path, Stylesheet path (link to relevant site). You will get some improvements.
6. Review your themes. Some themes call a lot of graphics, and overall call a lot of files. If your CSS files are divided into multiple files, combine them. Replace graphics wherever possible with text.
7. Review the plugins your are using to see whether they are required. Plugins can make your site much slower, especially if they do a lot of DB access and inefficient. If you are advanced technically, monitor the performance of your plugins.
8. Refer to this quick cheat sheet for DB optimization (link to cheat sheet)
9. Reduce the number of posts on the front page of your blog. Typically, WordPress gives you 10 posts on your front page, you should reduce this to 3-4.
10. Use WP’s Built in Object Cache as described on this page (link). From the same site, refer to the MySQL Query Cache.
11. For some detailed technical analysis of what can be done (link)
12. Clean Options (Finds orphaned options and allows for their removal from the wp_ options table) – Get it from this page
13. The combating comment spam page on WordPress.org (link). If you have a good blog which is getting popular, increase in spam is only to be expected. Akismet filters out most comment spam, but just getting it into the junk spam list also adds some load to your server.
14. Page with 5 tips for making your Blog Digg / Slashdot proof (link)
15. High Traffic Tips For WordPress on WordPress.org Codex (link)

If you know more ways beyond this, please do let me know.

Running into problems with hosting service – 2

ashish — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 17:56:23 +0000

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.

Running into problems with hosting service – 1

ashish — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 03:34:39 +0000

I run a number of WordPress blogs and some other applications, and am hosted on Hostmonster for all these items. A few days back, I ran into a major problem where I found that suddenly my blogs and other photo galleries, etc, all had been replaced with a standard Hostmonster message that the account had been suspended for some time due to causing a risk to the performance of the servers. This is one area that a person needs to be really careful about, since these are servers where a number of different user accounts run at the same time, and the host cannot allow one member to have bad processes running that would affect the server or the performance of other users.
However, this was something that was scary to me – if the blogs shut down, then so goes the chance of using these blogs to develop money to the extent that I could stop from my current job. So I went to the Live Customer Support, and asked them about my problem. Hostmonster (and most other hosting services) do not offer free technical help in resolving problems, but I did get some transcipts from the logs that helped me to solve some of the problems. What was happening was that some processes in a WordPress Blog that I host about Consumer Rights in India (link) were over-loading the server and causing Hostmonster to stop my account. To get my account back in line, I was supposed to make things better, and then could apply for getting my account back in operation.
I am out of touch technically with getting into the internals of WordPress, and so was initially confused about what to do to solve this problem – however, I needed to get my account enabled again, else that would be the end of my blogging career (I can’t run all the accounts on Blogspot only, need to have some WordPress Blogs). From the logs that I got from Customer Service, it soon became clear that this had somehting to do with the Comments section of the WordPress Blog. This Blog of mine receives well over 1000 spam comments every day, and I have very rarely gone in and deleted these spam comments explicitly – WordPress gets rid of them every month or so.
Now that I had some top level indicators of what I needed to do, and what the exact problem could be, I needed to drill down deep, search for solutions, and get my account and my blogs re-activated. The steps I took are outlined in the next post (due shortly).