For the last 3 weeks my blog has been running really, really slow. With the long weekend upon us, I decided to take some time to try and find / fix the issue. After 4 hours of poking around, it turned out to be a number of issues…
I assumed that when I moved to a about 6 months ago something went a bit AWOL. I had a look at the server for CPU usage, memory, write speed & mysql and everything seemed to be fine. The main issue turned out to be with wordpress or a WP plugin.
When I looked at my wordpress database tables and noticed that I had 14,000 rows in the wp_options table. The rows consisted of rss requests from magpie. After I cleared them out I have seen an instant boost. The mysql query to do this is
Delete from `wp_options` where `option_name` LIKE ‘rss_%’;
This got me thinking about how I can speed up the blog a bit more. First port of call was .
Second thing I looked at was moving all my static files over to a (content delivery network). I already had an account setup, so I set up a new bucket with a CNAME’ed sub domain. I kept the same directory structure and redirected all css, gif, jpg, png & js files over to the s3.
PS: S3 is not a true CDN .. see for a real CDN solution.
After all the tweaks I have reduced page load time from 15 seconds to 4/5 seconds.
Let me know if you spot any issues.
That’ll be the Tweet Tweet plugin! Update it because the newer version does garbage collection on the rss records!
Ahh! that explains it .. I also noticed a lot of requests coming off the WP dashboard. Could the RSS rows have built up over the years?
There’s one cache record per rss feed so it’s doubtful. The reason Tweet Tweet generates so many is because of the “since” timestamp added to the end. It’s a whole new feed!
Jason
Caching via super-cache or whatever’s popular at the moment can help. When I was using WordPress I also used APC to help speed things up
Michele