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
via Pat Phelan comes a nifty WordPress plugin which speeds up posting from WordPress blogs.
Called WP-No Ping Wait, the plugin works by waiting until after the post has been posted before alerting the pinging services!
Nice one, thanks Pat.
UPDATE - this plugin has caused issues on a number of sites I manage so I have disabled it until a more stable version comes out.
Blogger is Google’s free hosted blogging platform. Blogger’s steady decline as a blogging platform has been well documented by Blogger users.
Via Marshal Kirkpatrick today comes news that Google have launched (in beta, of course!) a newer version of Blogger. This version has lots of shiny bits such as allowing change of colour of your blog using a WYSIWYG interface:
And it also allows drag and drop manipulation of various aspects of the blog:
The new version requires users to have a Google account which is a bit of a mixed blessing. It also allows for tagging of posts using the Labels field - in fact this is probably the most useful update to the entire application.
Given Google’s lacklustre commitment to Blogger over the last two years and the very little progress in this update I would say to anyone thinking of starting a blog now to stay from Blogger and use the likes of WordPress.com instead. If you are on Blogger - move to a real blog platform. You know you want to.
UPDATE: - for a more comprehensive review of the update see the Google Operating System blog. And Blogger’s official post about it is here
WordPress was updated to version 2.0.4 over the weekend.
This release contains several important security fixes, so it’s highly recommended for all users. We’ve also rolled in a number of bug fixes (over 50!), so it’s a pretty solid release across the board.
WordPress 2.0.4 is available for download here.
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