The quick growth here at KnowingArt.com finally got the best of me. On Monday according to MeasureMap, 2311 visitors accessed this blog. I noticed that the server was slowing to a crawl. I was disappointed with WordPress, my hosting, my plugins, but it’s my fault too. My host, Site5, responded by “correcting the load on the box” but that doesn’t make me feel much better. I don’t blame Site5, I’m not exactly a big spender over there.
Here’s Tuesday’s traffic graph:
I noticed the problem at 3:15pm and put in another support ticket at Site5. Notice that I was stuck at about 70 visitors/hour until about 5pm. I think by then Site5 had “corrected the load” on my virtual server, also I was scrambling to make some quick, minor changes. I’m pretty sure that MeasureMap waits for the entire page to load before counting a “visit” so you get the feeling that my server was only able to handle about 70 visitors/hour until I noticed the problem and took action. You also got to wonder if Google tests the responsiveness of popular pages throughout the day to see if it’s sending more traffic than you can handle–that would seem logical, but maybe I’m overestimating Google’s capabilities. What I do know is that SE robots are hammering my pages all day long so they must be doing something constructive.
Here’s Wednesday:
Wednesday morning I made some significant changes that I explain below to speed up my pages. Notice that traffic kept climbing through the day from 3pm all the way until 9pm. That’s a major improvement. Wednesday was a record-breaking day in terms of total visits.
On Tuesday I could tell by watching the page render, this was a MySQL problem. The page rendered in spurts, freezing or pausing on database elements like “categories”. This is partially a problem with the design of WordPress, but it’s also my problem because I want to have many categories here. This was partially my fault because I’m using some statistical plugins that are probably using MySQL somewhat intensely.
So why is this a huge problem? The site was getting so slow you would sometimes even get a database connection error screen–not good! If a search engine robot finds my server slow or unresponsive, that’s like a death sentence. Google is not going to give priority listings to unresponsive blogs, that’s just common sense. The once nice thing about MeasureMap, I can see when my blog is not responding and my traffic is taking a nosedive, whereas my server stats just record the initial request and everything looks fine. Nobody wants to wait for my blog to render on the screen–I’ve already had complaints from friends. This annoyed me too because I knew it wasn’t necessary, and I knew that I was going to need to make major changes to get the page to render faster.
I started to look at my blog: where can I get some extra speed in the meantime without sacrificing too much content? The first thing I did was I took out most of the numerical stats. The graph at the bottom of the page tells most of the story, so I dropped the “weekly” stats from the sidebar. I also told my stats plugin to only do analysis for one day instead of seven totalled up–that should speed things up. I still have the totals at the top of the sidebar because I don’t think that is going to take up much CPU/MySQL time. I can’t do without my categories, so I am leaving them alone. I dropped the stock quotes. Query Echo isn’t using MySQL so that’s not really an issue, but I dropped it from 400 to 300. Also, I dropped the number of posts on the front page from eleven to nine.
Ok, so how long can I last with these minor changes? Until 2000 uniques/day? 10,000 uniques/day? The real issue is that my blog will be growing. If I don’t reach 10k/day next month, I will next year–sooner or later I’m going to need to be working with a host that knows what they are doing. Tight, lean code is great, but we don’t need grid computing to render a WordPress blog. I need a host that knows blogging, WordPress and MySQL performance. So, is there any host out there that specializes in performance MySQL/WordPress blog hosting that would like to work out a deal and host me in exchange for my business and advertising in my sidebar?
I can’t be the only one out there with this problem. Many blogs get spikes of traffic at one point or another, and what good is it if your server slows to a crawl? I don’t think that it is wise at this point to make this a WordPress issue when new servers are blazing faster than ever. I’m not going to switch to a substandard blogging system and give up my custom modifications just because MySQL is poking along. If there are other WordPress bloggers out there, what do you think? Looking into the future, it seems to me that the solution to this nearly universal problem will be a hosting service that focuses on MySQL and blogging performance–such a necessary service would be well received instantly, recognized and applauded. Yahoo or Google could never pull it off–they are just too big. Nobody expects great service and performance from a monolithic, one-size-fits-all host.
In February I didn’t even use 3 gigs, but this month I suspect I could get up over 10 gigs. My point is that I’m not using much bandwidth, I just need a snappy, responsive server for my blog so that I can continue to grow–is that too much to ask?