Friends can slow you down
The things I do for my readers!
I have just taken the site asunder. Once again, the place was in a mess. I cut my arm on a nasty protruding piece of javascript and I’m bleeding all over the place.
But I think I have found the problem.
Apparently, every time someone tried to load a page or write a comment, my site went ballistic and had to go running off to its database over four thousand times. This was strange. Suppose I asked you a question and you had to read four thousand pages of a dictionary before you could reply? It’s no wonder it was slow.
So I disabled everything and I found the little bugger that was causing the problem.
I had a wee plugin running called Community Cloud. It showed up on a page I called “Friends?”. I have discovered that if I remove that, then the site only goes running to the database about forty times. So everything is faster. A hundred times faster?
Community Cloud has been removed. It is no more. I put it on a bonfire in the garden, and it exploded with a bang.
I’m not saying that Community Cloud is a bad plugin.
It’s just that I probably have too many friends.
Next you will blame me, since I took up the most space in there!
Are you writing me off then?
Sometimes I pine for the simplicities of yesteryear. Remember analylsis paper? Those where the days, a pencil,a rubber and cries of “why doesn’t the ******ing thing balance.” Now it all automatic in Excel or Works. And the sods wan’t it yesterday with eight different “what ifs”.
Like, my postman, is a much diminished figure, delivering junk and bills. Those where the days when letters came from all over the world with exotic stamps upon them and we chatted at the door about foriegn lands.
Bring back the good old days! Well maybe not, as it is all to handy. But I do find we can add on a few to many gizmos to do what should be a simple thing. But enough or I will be rambling on about my old Ford 10.
Hope the comments work.
Grannymar – Of course you are to blame. You hogged the whole page anyway.
KevanB – I remember when they first brought computers in. “They are going to do away with paper”. “They are going to make life simpler”. “They will take the hard work out of everything”.
HAH!
But they are fun to mess around with, and I wouldn’t be chatting to you without them!
Everything works.
But do you notice the difference???
Over four thousand queries? Are you serious?
That’s nuts. WordPress is pretty heavy on queries anyway but over 4000 is just insane.
I don’t know if I completely buy this Community Cloud excuse. Did you ever check and see if your SQL grommit was installed correctly? I installed that plugin and built a page called My Community of Friends and it seems to be working just fine. I hooked up a Database timing light and checked to see what happens when I leave a comment and my DB-RPM’s were well within specs. I wonder if you tuned your Google Analytics for the correct displacement of your database and is it set for Oracle or SQL?
Oh, heck, I just realized you may still be running that old Foxbase you bought back in ’81. What did I tell you? Parts haven’t been available for them in years. I had a guy come in the shop the other week with one of those and I had to use Opel parts and an adapter kit. I’ll tell you the same thing I told him. You had better junk it before it leaves you stranded in the middle of a post somewhere. The Internet Police don’t take kindly to some old database broke down and blocking traffic on the Super Highway, ya’ know.
Robert – Actually, the exact figure was 4,624 queries. It’s now down to 44!
Brianf – Of course your Community Cloud works properly. That’s because you don’t have any friends. It’s simple, when you think about it.
I have installed only genuine parts, and have fine tuned everything using a strobe light. To be on the safe side, I have an emergency kit that is locked in the Admin area, so if I have a breakdown somewhere, I can always fix it, even if I’m up in the mountains. I also carry a warning triangle and a first aid kit. I have even upgraded the Snargle to Snargle V3.5.76 which hasn’t even been invented yet, so I’m way ahead of the game now.
Technical advice: Don’t use Google Chat and can I have a snargle please. I’m feeling very left out!
Okay, I guess that makes sense. Although the plugin creates any tables, with your amount of comments per day I can imagine the amount of queries to your database and processes thereof would build up to a choke hold on your poor server. Guess we’ll see how the long run goes without it.
Now I’m having to think about losing the “Enhanced Plugins” (Plugins I Use) plugin. There’s been a lot of hooraw about how making public a list of your plugins can be a major security problem. Hackers can look at your list and possibly find back doors through badly coded or out of date plugins. Of course we wouldn’t install anything like a badly coded or out of date plugin, would we now?
Kirk M – A few people have commented now on how much faster the site is. It really was a pain. The one good thing is that it was a gimmick rather than a necessity.
I thought about the Enhanced Plugins, and tossed up whether it would be better to run it to help other bloggers, or to remove it for security. I think security wins. I’m not normally paranoid, but this site is getting its share of publicity, and could be a target.
Yup! The site’s faster alright. I do believe I may lose both plugins myself. Speed and security have to come before anything else.