{"id":2156,"date":"2009-02-16T12:34:52","date_gmt":"2009-02-16T17:34:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=2156"},"modified":"2009-02-16T12:37:32","modified_gmt":"2009-02-16T17:37:32","slug":"site-update-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=2156","title":{"rendered":"Site Update"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m pretty frustrated with the performance of this website. The recent links from Slashdot and Reddit have shown that the thing is fragile and will fold up under a wave of visitors. In general, new visitors are the worst ones to lose. Regulars will check back later if the site is down right now, but a new visitor is going to surf by without a second look if they click a link and don’t get a timely response. Life is too short to wait around for feeble websites.<\/p>\n

I use Hosting Matters<\/a>, and they host blogs even larger than mine without difficulty. I still soak up more bandwidth than even their largest plan has to offer, but the site isn’t anywhere near large enough to warrant a dedicated server or anything. So I can only conclude that the site is creating some sort of performance bottleneck. I also suspect that the problem isn’t bandwidth, but CPU cycles. PHP can keep the processor pretty busy. Things like Wavatars , the dice roller, and some of the other little gimmick plugins are no doubt creating a load that more text-based blogs don’t have to deal with. <\/p>\n

Some wordpress plugins are CPU intensive, either due to their scope or inefficient coding. In some cases a seemingly innocuous plugin can bring down an entire machine<\/a>, all by itself. I really think that web hosting companies need to give you a way of seeing how much CPU you’re using. You can see how much bandwidth and harddrive you’re using, but there’s no way to gauge CPU use short of calling up your hosting company and asking them, “So… how’s it goin?” It’s clear this site caused a lot of problems yesterday. Not just for me, but for anyone else using the Adams server at Hosting Matters. But site admins and plugin authors don’t usually have any motivation or tools for making well-behaved sites, because you can’t judge how well something works until it blows up.<\/p>\n

Some hosts offer a little green light \/ red light to let you know how the machine is doing, but that only lets you know that there is a problem, not how bad it is or who caused it. Site admins would do better if we could see how many CPU cycles we’re consuming. This would make people aware of which plugins cause problems, which will lead to more efficient plugins in the future. CPU use wasn’t an issue back in the days of static HTML pages, but with all this fancy-pants PHP stuff it’s moved to the forefront. Webhosts will disable your site if it begins crushing the shared machine hosting it, so it’s a bit like a world with an enforced speed limit where nobody owns a speedometer. <\/p>\n

Yesterday I upgraded this site to WordPress 2.7.1, and installed the Super Cache plugin. In theory, this should greatly reduce CPU load by serving static pages to most visitors. Only myself and people who have left comments (less than 1% of visitors) will see dynamic pages. Again, this should help, but I have no way of knowing until the next big rush of visitors. Let me know if anything seems screwy. I know on the backend, everything has been moved around to the point where I’m constantly getting lost. But the site itself should work exactly as before for you. I do trust you’ll let me know if this is not the case.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m pretty frustrated with the performance of this website. The recent links from Slashdot and Reddit have shown that the thing is fragile and will fold up under a wave of visitors. In general, new visitors are the worst ones to lose. Regulars will check back later if the site is down right now, but […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[111],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2156","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-notices"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2156","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2156"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2156\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2156"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2156"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2156"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}