WordPress 1.21 causing high loads?

There have been many efficiency improvements since v1.2.1 and upgrading is highly recommended. However, more than likely one of your plugins is causing the problem. If it is possible, I would deactivate all plugins, then ask your hosting provider if there is a noticeable difference in server load.

>>is 1.21 less efficient to 1.5/1.51?<<<

I found that 1.5 was faster, easier, better on the eye, more powerful to use (capabilities) and the pull on the server is very low. Except during setup and testing phase, but that wasn’t much either.

Also, for much much less you can get a host that will give you plenty without a dedicated server business stuff.

More than that, I was bombarded with comment spam in 1.2 that is almost totally nuked in 1.5 without all the special plugins. This could be driving up your server access, too.

I found also that I used much less hacks (and some are now built-in) and plugins than I did with 1.2 since the capabilities have expanded and the control increased. It’s worth the stress and mess and fuss and you may find out that your site is even better than it was before when you get done. Learning curve, sure, but worth it. Well worth it. And don’t forget, it’s free and worth more than that. ??

Try optimizing your database, might cut back a little bit of the load.
Upgrading would be a GREAT idea not just because 1.5 is so much more powerful, but because of security holes that might put your site or webhost at risk.

You might want to ask them for proof of the load issues also… could be some type of ploy to get you to upgrade to a dedicated server.

Caching is also vastly improved. Like, vastly vastly.

https://photomatt.net/2005/05/11/wp-cache/

thanks all for piping in. i don’t how i will resolve the hosting situation but i will try to undertake an upgrade when i can. am pushing hostgator to allow me to make some changes and stay on a shared box. we are a non-profit and cannot afford to be muscled into ‘putting out’ for a oversized plan. frankly it feels like extortion… they give me no warning of their concerns and even no email notification when they did pull the plug. now the sales response claims we are spared suspension by a 1-week trial account upgrade, but in fact no account details have been sent, and the site remains down. well, enough whining… for now:>)

i am running a 1.5 experimental blog elsewhere with charles johnson’s wonderful plugin “feedwordpress” (https://projects.radgeek.com/feedwordpress) and loving the improvements.

more later and thanks again for the responses.

Ask them for SPECIFICS.
Exactly which script is running amok ?
While going up to 1.5.1 may be an answer, until you have full details and a chance to discuss them, you are being kept in the dark. I would ask for server logs – someone here will be able to help you interpret them.

Hi, this is Ben from HostGator.com, this is not a ploy to make you upgrade, we were logged into the server watching it in top as his processes were using tons of CPU and causing problems with Exim etc. We very very rarely have problems with WordPress, it is well written and does not cause the problems PHPNuke does on a regular basis. But in this case we watched as his site and script caused the problems, why would we make this up? We have 10,000 clients and don’t go around looking to make them upgrade.

We also have a very high uptime guarantee that we aim to keep in order to keep our reputation. We rarely give a site we see do this a second chance as we can’t afford to have downtime on issues that already happened once. If you feel strongly enough that we are wrong about what we saw in top that you would be willing that if it did cause problems to pay for everyone’s month of credit on that server if it went down again and over the uptime guarantee amount? I hope this explains the situation we are in and I would welcome any comments on what you feel is fair.

I have emailed you privately trying to further explain what I did on the phone and hopefully we can help you out, I would appreciate any info on if you had any plugins etc installed you think caused this,
Thanks, Ben

PS. Also, we had the choice of leaving your site up causing problems for every other site on the server or suspending you, which would you have liked us to do? It upsets me a little you would call that extortion as I would call it keeping our promise to our customers.

The RSS consuming things like FeedWordPress, Reblog, and Feed on Feeds are pretty notorious for consuming massive amounts of resources, which is why we haven’t integrated any of them more closely into WP.

Question: My host is saying the same thing to me now. It is php.cgi that is consuming the most resources. What does that do? Should I turn off my RSS feed? I also don’t get how having a blog could be consuming so many resources. I have updated to 2.0.2 or whatever is the latest this week, and my site still took up 90% of the machine’s resources yesterday.

https://stripedwall.com

I only have the 4 most recent posts on the main page. I have no plugins besides the spam one activated, and I don’t even get many comments, so I don’t see how that one can be doing anything right now.

Argh. Help?

Make sure you have the /wp-content/cache/ folder writable. That will help a LOT.

And if you’re getting a TON of hits, might be time for a semi-dedicated server. If you aren’t, might be time for a non-crappy host that doesn’t pack 5 million people on a 1 GHz machine.

I should have /wp-content/cache/ chmod’d to ?? 755 ?

It looks like it is. Also, is it safe to just delete everything under /wp-content/cache/ ?

This was their email:
“It was causing high loads on your shared server. From looking at it, it appears the problem may be caused by your index page (which appears to loop).”

Writeable is 666 or 777 depending on your server setup.

Well, just to see what happens, I am pulling the RSS feeds and the blog for a few days, and if the usage goes back to normal (10% usually), I will decide then about keeping the blog up. Thanks!

It’s not the rss feeds. The FeedWordPress thing described earlier (in this thread you’ve hijacked…) is a “re-blogger”, which grabs content from OTHER feeds and re-posts them onto your own site.

How many hits are you getting per day? Have you looked at site logs? What plugins are you running? What theme are you running? The comment from your host of the index page “appears to loop” doesn’t sound good… did you modify the theme yourself?

-d

How many hits are you getting per day? Stats for the past day:

Successful requests: 147,408
Successful requests for pages: 15,768
Distinct files requested: 29,165
Distinct hosts served: 519
Data transferred: 1.26 gigabytes

Have you looked at site logs? Yes.
What plugins are you running? None.
What theme are you running? A custom one based off of WordPress Default.

The comment from your host of the index page “appears to loop” doesn’t sound good… did you modify the theme yourself? Yes, but mostly to give it new CSS as far as I remember. The site only started over-using resources this past week. The blog and site itself has been online for 9 months.

Sorry about “hi-jacking” – didn’t know there was such a thing. I searched for ‘resource usage’ and found this thread, so instead of creating a new one, I added to it, which I thought was the preferred method.