Do full path URL links 2 your own site pages really cause “too many connections

BS

If there are CPU problems, either you got too many plugins or badly coded plugins enabled or your host has overloaded their server with clients that is affecting you and they can’t see what the problem is and therefore they are blaming whatever they can.

“too many connections”

Guessing they are speaking about HTTP connections and if that is the case, there won’t be any difference that I have ever seen and I been managing servers for a very long while.

A good dedicated server, with a high-reputation company. It’s the only site on it. Just a few standard plugins.

Here is part of the conversation:

Me:

My server went down yesterday morning around 6;30 am pst. Your support person I spoke with said the problem was that there were too many absolute URL links, versus relative paths, on my site, on the server. The only thing I can think of that changed on my site prior was that I had the thumbnail images you see on the “teaser” articles (the 15 or so smaller article displays you see at the bottom of my content) on the home page using absolute paths to the image files, not relative paths. And these thumbnail images are clickable to the underlying article.

He said that each absolute path creates a new instance, or connection, that ends up with the “too many connections” error. for the server I have since changed them all to relative paths.

But since yesterday, I’ve been searching and searching for any information to support this theory and I cannot find a thing on it, and no one at WordPress or elsewhere seems interested enough to think it’s a problem. (Although it’s not a WP problem) Not doubting you guys, I just want tomake sure, since it will affect how I do some things in the future. For example, I want to place a bunch of internal links in WordPress’s Links function to display them in the sidebar, but I am only able to enter absolute URL’s in the Links Manager and so am now afraid this might cause the same problem.

So, can someone who really understands this on your staff please verify that placing absolute URL internal links on a page, will in fact contribute to my server crashing?

Web Host:

The absolute vs relative links usage on a server is less for internal links for navigation and more for pulling up things such as images, css files, javascript code that is loaded at the same time as your page. The internal links in the navigation bar wouldn’t affect the server’s performance.

Me:

Thank you, that makes sense.

Just to make sure I understand fully, an absolute link that pulls up something that needs to be loaded adds more stress on the server than does a relative link. Does the absolute link actually add another “connection” that the server counts as another user, or some sort of “instance”, and then that count can hit a limit that causes problems?

Web host:

When a dns request comes from the pages code it creates a new connection to the machine instead of using the already open connection. That adds additional stress because of the number of connections each time a person loads your page creates so many unneeded connection. On lower traffic sites it isn’t as much of a problem but when you have 100 visitors a second and you have an extra 5 per one then you have 500 connections instead of 100.

Umm. I still disagree with some parts of that (may just be me, but I doubt it).

The absolute vs relative links usage on a server is less for internal links for navigation and more for pulling up things such as images, css files, javascript code that is loaded at the same time as your page. The internal links in the navigation bar wouldn’t affect the server’s performance.

When they link to the same place, don’t see any differences at all. It still uses the same load, bandwidth etc to load the image etc regardless which way.

When a dns request comes from the pages code it creates a new connection to the machine instead of using the already open connection. That adds additional stress because of the number of connections each time a person loads your page creates so many unneeded connection. On lower traffic sites it isn’t as much of a problem but when you have 100 visitors a second and you have an extra 5 per one then you have 500 connections instead of 100.

This part makes some sense however still isn’t exactly true either. The DNS requests are cached and therefore a new connection isn’t made for DNS as it just uses the cache instead. Unless they are talking about something else there other then DNS, I would say there say that they are just placing the issue on that rather then what it is.

I see you said you are using your own server and if it got to the stage in which it is outgrowing that (by the sounds of it), you may wish to upgrade the server, get another web server hooked up or change your web server software to something like lite speed to help the load.

My host has said the same thing now – did you ever get a resolution to this problem?