T w e n t y S i d e d

Yes, the site theme has changed. No, this is not a permanent change. I’m just mucking around trying to figure out why the site is so ridiculously slow. I’ve fussed with the database, I’ve turned off all my plugins, I’ve checked the error logs, I’ve scoured the WordPress help pages, and I’ve said swear words in a loud, authoritative voice. I’m basically out of ideas at this point.

SOMETHING is making it incredibly expensive to show pages. It gets bad when lots of people are commenting. It gets horrible to the point of uselessness when I add a new post. We’ll see what this does.

EDIT: Initial test: Inconclusive. I’m going to let this sit for couple of hours and watch performance as comments appear and I edit posts.

EDIT: Well, I stripped the site down to the bones. Default theme, no plugings. (And then, just plugins to rebuff spam.) The site loaded fine, but posting comments still takes over a minute. Actually, the comment goes up right away, but the person leaving the comment gets stuck waiting for the page to refresh. The same thing happens when I dd a new post or update an old one. Basically, submitting a form results in an epic page load for no reason in the world. It could be the form. It could be modifying the database. It could be rebuilding the affected pages. I don’t know.

There are 235,000+ comments on the site. That’s a lot, but in the grand scheme of things they shouldn’t clog up the works that badly.

I really am at a loss. There’s no reason for this. I contacted my web host and the machine itself seems fine. No rogue processes eating CPU/memory/bandwidth. It’s just another stupid WordPress blog.

EDIT: On the advice of the tech support guru at my host, I dropped the Super Cache plugin and switched to W3 Total Cache. The difference is pretty stark. I’m hopping around the admin pages with a speed I haven’t seen in over a year. Comments seem to be working well. We’ll see how this goes.

Thank you for your continued patience.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.