17 Dec, 2008
Before you get plugin crazy…let’s talk server load
Posted by: Blogging Fool In: Blog Setup|Blogging Mistakes|Blogging Tips|Web Hosting|Wordpress|Wordpress Plugins
I started disabling stuff that might put further strain on the server – turning off Nofollow Reciprocity, Tag Suggest Thing, WP Auto Tagger, Most Recent Visitors and WassUp, my realtime stats recorder (instead I switched to the ole’ standby WordPress.com Stats since it does all its work over at Worpress’s servers) – anything I could thing of. Don’t get me wrong – these are all amazing tools and ultimately not the real cause of the problem.
As I looked at the slow MySQL query logs again I kept seeing the same culprits:
SELECT ID, post_title, post_date, post_content, post_excerpt, (MATCH (post_content) AGAINST (’0 etc etc
Line after line of this stuff. Then I had my aha moment (please forgive me if you are a programmer, I am writing for those who are just getting going here) – the database was being asked to look at all the header elements in some kind of wild search.
That would most likely happen if every time someone click on a blog post, the site was trying to return information based on all the other tags, categories, titles and bodies that I had defined for all the posts I had ever written.
I went to YARPP’s homepage and sure enough at the bottom, the author plainly states:
Does YARPP slow down my blog/server?
A little bit, yes. Every time you display a post with automatic display of related posts (or one of the
related_*()functions) it will calculate the related posts, which can be a database-intensive operation. I highly recommend all YARPP users use a page-caching plugin, such as WP-SuperCache. For the majority of users, this type of caching will be enough to stem the performance issues.
