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
If you have a large blog with many (>1000) posts or have many tags or categories, YARPP may noticibly affect your blog’s performance, even with a caching plugin. For these large blogs, for the time being I recommend you disable the “consider tags” and “consider categories” options. Turning off any “disallow” tags or categories will also speed things up.
In the future I will be building a YARPP-internal cache system so that YARPP can calculate all the post-relations at one time and then re-use those results every time, rather than calculating them on the fly.
All I had to do, was go to the YARPP settings, change the number of related posts it would show at the bottom of each post and in RSS feeds from 5 to 3 and already I was saving my server a lot of trouble. But another thing I did was to simply tell it not to consider tags at all! It still does a bang up job of finding related content, but now it doesn’t have to search through dozens and dozens of tags to do it. Yeah I know you want laser accuracy, but really the tool is just there to indicate stuff people might also be interested in.
So after ALL that – I recommend you implement all the safety measures I took anyway. Install a caching plugin like Hyper Cache or WP Super Cache, try out WP Widget Cache, Cache Images, definitely get WP-DBManager up and running for good housekeeping and backup insurance, and make sure you configure the related posts plugin of your choice correctly. Unless you have a dedicated server, you have to take into account that you are here to BUILD TRAFFIC without fear. Taking care of the essentials will afford you some comfort and confidence to do so without fearing you will get booted out of your own home.
I want to say thanks to all the developers I have mentioned above. In no way is any of this a slight at your amazing work. I just hope someone learns how to be responsible with their power tools before plugging them in.
Now I had finally better get to bed and get some sound sleep before the server load on my girlfriend returns an Account Suspended message in the morning.
Do you have any tips on optimizing your WordPress blog for MySQL friendliness?
