The next version of WordPress - version 2.1 is to be released later today and Aaron Brazell has a good post outlining 10 features of WordPress 2.1 you should be aware of.
One that I love is the AutoSave feature. I have lost several posts during writing which I wouldn’t have lost if I had this feature. Another is the upgrade tool - that’s right, WordPress 2.1 on installation will automatically upgrade your previous installation making the whole installation process that much easier, it seems.
Looking forward to giving 2.1 a whirl!
In my last post, I was wondering how to fix the issues people were having leaving comments on this site. Attempts to leave comments were timing out and the comments were not being posted.
Fortunately I had lots of great suggestions from readers on how to resolve the issues and I think it is now fixed (famous last words?).
The fix also seems to have had the knock-on effect of drastically speeding up the site - wohoo! A big thank you to everyone for your great suggestions.
The steps I took to resolve this were:
Of those changes, the last one (suggested by James (aka MacManX)) appeared to have the most dramatic positive effect. The site is now running way faster and comments seem to be posting successfully.
This site averages around 1750 unique visitors a day according to Awstats and about 3-4 times that according to Webalizer (Awstats strips out visits from robots/spiders/bots, etc.) so I am guessing that the comments were timing out because the site/server were under pressure.
Turning on the WordPress object cache took the pressure off and is now letting the comments through.
Sincere apologies to anyone who had problems recently leaving a comment on this site - hopefully it won’t happen again.
I have had several reports from people who have had issues trying to leave comments on this site and it concerns me greatly. Conor made six attempts to leave a comment this afternoon (fair dues to his persistence)
I initially thought it had to do with the number of comments in my Akismet queue but I have been deleting that regularly recently.
Some commenters have speculated that it is due to a lack of memory on my hosting company’s server.
The managing director of my hosting company responded to that comment saying that:
A lot of the plugins and anti-spam measures can slow down comments etc, considerably, as each and every request not only involves several SQL queries but a number of DNS lookups and other processes.
That’s all well and good but the only anti-spam plugin I have on the site is the default Akismet plugin which ships with WordPress so it isn’t that.
Anyone any ideas where the problem might lie? WordPress (I recently upgraded to 2.0.5)? My hosting company? Somewhere else?
If you have problems commenting here, please email me at tom@tomrafteryit.net
Comment issues on this site fixed?
A couple of people mentioned to me that they were having issues leaving comments once more on this site.
On the advice of Donncha (lead developer for WordPress.com), I installed wp-cache 2.0 on this blog along with Donncha’s own patch for it.
It certainly seems to have speeded up the blog - is anyone still having problems leaving comments?