Blogging Fool

So I installed WP Super Cache – a powerful evolution of WP Cache that basically turns your dynamic, needy website into a bunch of more static html pages, so that when the user comes to your site, the server is just spitting out what is in the cache rather than having to rebuild everything from scratch.

When I continued to get “mysql_slow_queries” logs that showed my posts taking way too much time to load, I tried out Hyper Cache, an even more aggressive caching system.  There are others as well.  Maybe it improved things, but I couldn’t really go to sleep with a sound mind.  Something was still wrong.  I was still getting logs that showed heavy bottlenecks.

WordPress is already a very greedy MySQL hog by nature – it is pulling lots and lots of cross-referenced pages from a database.  We don’t make this any easier when we install plugins that ask it to display all other possible pages that could relate to the one we are reading.

The next plugin I installed on all my blogs was Widget Cache.  I figured might as well cache all those plugins too.  Don’t worry – the widget cache won’t suddenly freeze all those rotating banners and cool realtime-updating recent visitor sidebars – most of those run on Javascript or Ajax so they are client-side, as opposed to server-side intensive.

Still no real fix.

Regardless, I was feeling kind of good about cleaning things up.

I added Cache Images too.  Now I could check my whole site to see if I was somehow linking outside to an image, and if I was, this cool plugin create a local version of it that could thus be cached and again reduce the load that the server’s CPU had to handle.

Nah.  Still had problems.  Still not able to sleep soundly.

But wow I sure was learning a lot!


I added Lester ‘GaMerZ’ Chan‘s WP-DBManager which allowed me to optimize my database.  Cool!  I could even set it to do it automatically at whatever interval I chose.

Gosh – I guess I had been pretty negligent about the basic housecleaning.  I suddenly felt pretty cocky thinking I could just throw whatever I wanted up on that server and expect them to deal with it.  But i was still desperate for a real fix.

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