evening0star

Thanks, Otto42. I did EXPLAIN and didn’t know what I was looking at. What should I be looking for?

I also looked at the structure and it looks like there are indexes on the important fields within wp_posts. So that should be good, right?

I’m wondering if the problem we are having went away for some reason. I just got shell access, so I missed the outages, but I remember the host sending me a slice of a process script that was running. It seemed to match the above, except it was copying to tmp tables, which I was reminded of when I was just searching around on the support site for indexing mySQL.

I think all I can do now is just wait and see what happens.

I thought I’d add that according to my host we’re on a server all by ourselves, so when we’re overloading the server, we’re overloading the entire server all by ourselves.

It coincided with the election (it is a political blog), but we do go down every now and then for 15 min at a time. Obviously something is wrong, and I just can’t figure out what it is.

Hopefully the cache will take care of the problem, otherwise I don’t know what else I can do (I don’t think the server upgrades are the issue here…at least according to my host).

Thanks, HandySolo. I found that yesterday, along with a couple of other similar posts, and I plan on reviewing it with my host to determine the best course of action.

Warning to others who are learning as you go….the learning curve jumps dramatically after a certain point ??

Please forgive my ignorance and frustration, but that is what it looked like it was doing, and someone else who is a db expert agreed.

I’m just trying to figure out why this script appears to be bottlenecking and therefore overloading the server at certain times. I’ve tried taking out plugins, outside sources (like google adsense), etc, and the server kept getting overloaded. This script was taking forever to load and seemed to be the culprit.

And as soon as I changed the front page to load by # of days instead of by # of posts, the time it took to process the script reduced dramatically.

So maybe this is all coincidence and circumstantial, but it was the likely culprit in all my work and research on my problem. For this particular site, it does not appear to be very efficient.

So if it *is* efficient, then why the problems and bottlenecking? And long time loads?

And the guy who has been helping me out disagrees that indexes will help. …..Every step I take I end up back where I started…..

Otto42 – Right, I just figured out what this script is — it is how WP pulls in the # of posts I told it to display on the front page.

The problem is it is saying to check all posts (<=) and then take the top 12. But we have over 8000 posts, and there is no need to read them all! No wonder it can take so long.

So is there a way around this? Or a reason WP is scripted this way? There’s just so many parameters in the process, that it is very inefficient.

I just want to prevent the site overloading the server again, like we had the last few days (with the worst being for approx 7 hours).

OK, I finally got WP-Cache working (just got shell access and have never been in there before, so it took some time to figure that out).

I checked the site and that process is still taking a long time to load, even with the cache enabled. It is now up to 9 sec now that more people are on the site.

I assume Cache should work immediately, and if so, then it is not affecting this process.

What next??

oh, but I did disable the internal cache as indicated elsewhere. (still on 2.0.3)

No, I can’t get it loaded correctly (the symbolic links aren’t creating themselves, and I can’t figure out how to do it manually).