clicksharpmarketing

OK, I found my solution. I’m running WordPress 2.6.5 and the culprit was the Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP). It’s incredibly useful, but one day they added an upgrade to provide post recommendations in RSS as well… and as soon as that went active (by default, no less) it started bogging down my feed. Disable the RSS functionality of YARPP, and an otherwise healthy feed ought to be good to go.

@eh9116 – I’ve been suffering the same exact problem. Still digging for a solution but I posted here about the size of the MySQL database being a potential problem.

Has your blog been around for a while? Do you have an opinion on whether this might be the culprit?

Reading this makes me wonder if the size of the MySQL database could be an issue with read timeouts, etc. Ours is 92mb and the web host only supports up to 100mb, so I’ve been meaning to shave it down however I can (anyone know how to do this?).

But @globalfusion’s point about large posts tipped me off that dead weight may be messing with the health of the RSS feed. Sounds plausible… maybe?

Funny… for me it was an old version of Akismet which simply needed to be updated. As a rule of thumb, whenever pages go blank, error codes show up, or things generally go awry in WordPress — I’ve learned that you start the troubleshooting process in the Plugins folder.

FIRST make sure all the plugins are updated to the most recent version.

SECOND, if that doesn’t solve the problem, deactivate them one by one.

THIRD, if you isolate which plugin caused the problem, post it here! We’d love to hear about it.

Nailed it. Thanks everyone for your help.

This looks like you guys resolved the matter… just one question, where exactly did you make that edit? The theme I am using doesn’t seem to show category description by default, so I have no placeholder.

Thanks.

Good call Moshu. Here’s specifically what the post said:

Edit the wp-admin.css (under the wp-admin directory) and add “display: none;” to #update-nag section. (it’s near the very bottom)

The one thing is, it’s not near the very bottom, at least not in the installation I tried. But it does work… you just have to close the window and reopen, relogin to make sure the new CSS loads properly.