Filed under Blog News
A question for anyone who knows WordPress better than I do
Are there any related posts plugins for WordPress out there that are efficient and use a small amount of resources? I ask because DreamHost emailed me earlier to inform me that the now-disabled Yet Another Related Posts Plugin was, combined with the popularity of my site, blowing out their MySQL server. If I can’t find another plugin, I’ll either have to shell out the cash for a private MySQL server or go without – and I really like the related posts plugin. Any takers?
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/yet-another-related-posts-plugin/
For what it does, I have a hard time seeing how it could be consuming a lot of resources unless the caching of the “related posts” result is disabled. Maybe a “spike” when you add a post. Did they say you exceeded your limit “for the day” or “for the hour”?
I’ll take a look at it a little more tonight. It’s all in PHP, and not that big, so anyone who knows PHP can attempt to wade through the wordpress function garbage, but knowing a little about WordPress would help.
I have unlimited bandwidth, so that’s not the issue. The problem, in DreamHost’s words, was that the blog’s database “was causing some severe
load on the mysql server.” They didn’t mention anything about caching.
Given my increasing traffic, I’ll probably have to upgrade to a private server one of these days, but I’m not doing it over one plugin and I’m not risking DreamHost nuking my blog to save their hardware.
Are you using the Super Cache plugin?
No. Just activated and configured it now.
If all else fails, try another ISP to host it..there are many who charge about the same your current host is charging.
None of the related posts plugins worked the way I wanted them to, so I just decided not to bother with that.
There’s IntenseDatabase, but it cockblocks the site in high traffic hours.
Also, there’s js-kit.
Whoops, I meant IntenseDebate.
If you’re not using a caching plugin for WordPress then that’s why you’re causing them that much grief. WordPress’ performance is terrible without one. A typical page view will cause at least half a dozen SQL queries to be executed. I’ve seen templates that do dozens.
Gx1080:
I tried using IntenseDebate a while ago (along with Disqus and a bunch of other external comment programs), but they all had their own problems. ID in particular kept screwing up the timestamps, so comments would appear out of order.
From what I’ve read, you have to pay a monthly subscription in order to use JS-Kit now. Nuh-uh.
Mike T:
Holy crap. That explains a lot.
Thanks for the help.
I’m in the process of moving from bluehost to linode. About 3 times more expensive, but a lot better performance… It really pisses me off that these cheap shared host companies “punish” you for popularity. HelloOo… the hours when a site gets a massive traffic spike is when it needs MORE support, not LESS
I have heard a lot of horror stories about Disqus, mainly about comments being swallowed by the Internet.