willhines

Disabled Spam Karma 2. Enabled Akismet.
Disabled wp-cron.
Disabled comment on the post which is attracting all the traffic.

That might have put out the fire.

I’m going to need to be able to keep comments open while sustaining high traffic, but if it puts out the fire, I’m happy to disable them temporarily.

Awesome help, everyone!

Wow! This is awesome. Thank you so much.

Mediatemple has been nothing but great in many instances before. This is an anamoly. It’s like I pissed them off.

I’m working getting someone to help me isolate queries on the MySQL server.

I have a feeling it’s the comments. Our traffic is being driven up by an “exclusive” post on Britney Spears being pregnant. Yes, this is a hilarious problem. Viewers are commenting like crazy, and that forces a regeneration of the single post page. I’ve disabled comments on that post and are keep analyzing.

No Spam Karma 2? I was acutally worried that using Akismet would slow the site down if Akismet got overwhelmed. But now it’s MY local database which is overwhelmed, so maybe you’re right.

Cool. I’ll check these out.

Thank you for the advice.

I have asked repeatedly for prices of a dedicated server. They’re telling me that the software (WordPress) is so inefficient that IT is the bottleneck, not the server. That’s not their words — but they shrug off upgrading as a good solution, pointing to “WordPress.” It’s frustrating.

It seems like it’s subjective to blame either the software or the hardware. But I guess I have to either do what my ISP says or switch ISPs.

I’ll search for an ISP that will stand by WordPress, but I imgaine I’ll have to find a new blogging solution that they’re willing to work with.

I understand now that it’s not really the kind of thing that can be helped on a support forum. But I’m going to document this problem in case it’s helpful.

Our ISP is mediatemple.net, and I’ve been very happy with their support up till now. I think Zeldman gives them a shout-out in his blog. However, them quickly saying “It’s WordPress” doesn’t cut it for me. Even if they end up being “right”, it smacks too much of “let’s point at the one component we didn’t install.” I should point out they still respond very quickly and are polite, etc.

We’ve had indications of traffic problems before this and have asked about bumping up from a dedicated virtual server to a dedicated physical server. They seem oddly not interested in talking about that.

I’m not rebuilding the site just because my ISP won’t help examine where the bottleneck really is. Even if I abandon WordPress, wouldn’t ANY php-mysql app hit similar limitations with huge traffic?

Last night, I was getting error code I posted above. I was going to rebuild the database, courtesy of the daily backup I get from Scott Merrill’s plugin. But if there were disk errors, I was worried about somehow aggravating the problem by deleting and writing a bunch of data.

Stuff I’ve done/looked into:

* My ISP has asked if I can have a flat HTML front page. I’ve installed WP-cache (which my tech support guy found for me). Not truly a flat page, but I assume this is helping.

* After looking through these forums, I installed Jerome’s Query Diagnostics to see if any queries were holding us up.
This was for the front page.
This was for a single post.
Nothing stood out.

* It seems comments can cause problems, but comments are a big part of the site and I can’t disable them, or not for long, anyway.

* I cleared out the default entry (pingomatic?) in the “update services” box.

* I disabled trackbacks and pings (we never had many anyway).

* We don’t have a sidebar, so it’s not like there’s a list of categories or past entries whose queries could be slowing us down.

* We have plenty of disk space left — 10 gig of 17 available.

——————

This morning, I get this message from mediatemple:

“Due to a previously undocumented problem with the virtualization software, some users have been experiencing situations where they are exceeding their kmemsize limits.”

Not sure what a “kmemsize limit” is, but I assume it is usmagazine’s traffic that has created this problem. I’m hoping they can make hardware adjustments to allow me to keep using WordPress.

Let me say again that it’s amazing how well-documented the support for WordPress is, and amazing how easily I’m able to add plugins, and locate information on problems. I love it.

MySql 4.1.18

Still checking through the forums. I wonder why I typed that. But I did.