Slow loading and/or 'max_allowed_packet' with larger sites

Hi,

After having issues with, firstly, a slow loading site (checking templates and plugins and all to see how it can be fixed) then when I moved it from a testing platform to shared hosting, the wonderful world of ‘max_allowed_packet’ errors opened up to me.

This added days of grief experimenting and searching for answers on this forum and other forums, and trying to convince the hosting company that it is not an .htaccess error (since it was the raw WordPress unedited .htaccess content) and that the ‘max_allowed_packet’ needed adjusting if this site, and possibly many WordPress sites to come, were to function without creating a 500MB error_log each day.

And now I have to move the site to another server because the hosting company refuses to change their max_allowed_packet just to please one customer.

Things I noticed in the process were:
– A lot of people are having this problem.
– The rewrite rule tends to load all page rewrites for the whole site when loading just one page.

Along with the facts that everyone is preferring to use SEO friendly URLs these days, and blogs are growing massive over time, is it worth looking at some kind of fix that only loads the current page’s info?

I am not a programming genius and I have no idea how possible/impossible a fix like that would be, but it would save a hell of a lot of headaches.

Thanks for your time.
CW