Blog Marketing Academy - Latest Comments in Fighting The WordPress Dragons

Re: Fighting The WordPress Dragons

David Risley — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 08:39:53 -0000

Check out W3 Total Cache. It pretty much does everything... and was a life-saver for me over on PCMech.com when I was having major server load issues.

Re: Fighting The WordPress Dragons

Mitz Build Websites — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 20:41:47 -0000

This just happened to me and the longer I took to sort it out the more money and traffic went down the drain... My problem was that I was on a shared server (reseller account) and the hosting company shut me down for using all the resources..

I am moved to a dedicated server now but I am still cleaning the old tables out from the data base. I am shocked to see almost every plugin I ever activated had a table there still...

Also I am sure that I probably have Apache problems too but I have not investigated it yet..I am not really experienced with all this but I know my site has problems.

I installed DB Cache Reloaded Fix which claims to be faster and easier than WP supercache.. and I also installed WP-DBManager which allows you to optimize database, repair database, backup database,
restore database, delete backup database , drop/empty tables and run
selected queries.

I also deleted the ping lists I had as this can cause slow downs when the ping site times out.

The plugins...Well I have some favorites that I cannot live without that might be using up my resources such as SEOpressor and Scribe.. But I will get rid of all I can before they go.

Another plugin that was recommended to go was the related post plugin... I love those things...wasn't happy about that!

Re: Fighting The WordPress Dragons

iphone clone — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 00:37:19 -0000

This is great information for all of us who use WP,thanks for sharing

Re: Fighting The WordPress Dragons

Christian Russell — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 01:43:29 -0000

It's interesting that you wrote this article a little while ago; if I had read it when you actually posted it, the timing would have been perfect! Anyway, I do NOT have a high traffic site, but am always cool with finding a way to get better performance. I learned from a friend on twitter about this wp_options deal, and I found a ton of old entries and it sped page loads up noticeably. Pretty cool. You're absolutely right, when you get rid of a plugin...it's not gone!

Re: Fighting The WordPress Dragons

Adam Capriola — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 19:56:18 -0000

Hey David,

How do you access the options table to manually go in and delete entries? I am not sure how to do it.

Thanks in advance!

-Adam

Re: Fighting The WordPress Dragons

joebwharton — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 13:38:06 -0000

This is great information for all of us who use WP. Some of the plugins mentioned in the comments are on my list to check out. Thanks for the info.

Re: Fighting The WordPress Dragons

Chris @ Driving Spirit — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 09:24:14 -0000

An extremely useful post and some insightful comments too. It's a shame more plugins don't include an option to remove themselves completely from the database. I'm off to look at my wp-options table now.

Re: Fighting The WordPress Dragons

imegent78 — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 02:16:19 -0000

Waiting for another phenomenal post… It’d be nice to see some content worth reading (your blog is awesome!) since most of them are getting crappy these days.

Re: Fighting The WordPress Dragons

David Risley — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 13:57:04 -0000

Yeah. first of all, you can turn that off by putting the following line of code into your wp-config.php file:

define ('WP_POST_REVISIONS', 0);

Secondly, I think the WP-Optimize plug-in has ability to remove all post revisions that already exist.
http://wordpress.org/extend...

Re: Fighting The WordPress Dragons

David Risley — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 13:54:52 -0000

There is no answer for this. Its just a matter of maintaining Wordpress and optimizing your server. It isn't something you're going to have a really hard time with unless you have a high-traffic blog. And, by that point, chances are you'll know some people in the field who you can turn to. Often, just posting on Twitter for help will get you many volunteers.

Re: Fighting The WordPress Dragons

David Risley — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 13:53:00 -0000

I don't think my needs are yet high enough for a CDN, but the thought has crossed my mind.

Re: Fighting The WordPress Dragons

Alberto — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 12:07:51 -0000

Dude you are scaring me with all this.

What to do if it happens to me and i dont know all that mumbo jumbo?

Who would I call? Sounds like Blogmageddon.

Let your fearful followers know where to turn to if we shalt fall by the same fate?

For real David, you gotta get back to us on this and post up somthing about who to turn to for quick damage control. That would make a good post. So keep us informed ok. Peace and good luck with it.

Re: Fighting The WordPress Dragons

Bruce Inouye — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 11:47:21 -0000

David,

While we are talking about Wordpress using up a lot of space on servers here, I've noticed that WP saves all past versions of changes and modifications of posts and pages. Sometimes when I scroll down to the bottom of my post page after making a small edit, I see a very long line of past revisions. Is there a way I can delete all prior changes and modifications in that database? Seems like such a waste of space WP is using there.

Re: Fighting The WordPress Dragons

John Paul — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 11:31:14 -0000

Great Post.. I have been deactivating or removing plugins this past week. Hoping to speed up my blogs load time.

Looking into the Op Table now.

Again nice helpful post. TY

Re: Fighting The WordPress Dragons

Steve — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 22:21:41 -0000

I have the wp-optimize plugin installed which clears up the options table everytime you optimize the database. I don't pay as much as you do for hosting but I don't have the traffic either.

Re: Fighting The WordPress Dragons

Zemalf — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 07:08:18 -0000

I have WP-Db-Backup plugin doing automatic backups and optimization, and I think it's helping clearing the overhead on the tables (my wp_options is not nearly that big). There's also spesific Optimize Db -plugin and WP-DbManager also does the trick I believe.

Re: Fighting The WordPress Dragons

Dave Doolin — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 01:41:03 -0000

@cbahm:

A WordPress plugin may or may not leave options in the options table. It depends on the how the plugin developer wrote the code.

Some plugins give you the option to completely remove all options when you deactivate and remove. The default is to leave the options alone, so even if you delete the plugin files, their database entries are still present.

There are reasons why this can be a good thing. There are reasons why it's not so good. WordPress has no official policy that I know of.

Re: Fighting The WordPress Dragons

Dan Rippon — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 20:25:42 -0000

Thanks for the insight David, good to know the things that you should look out for.

I realise I'm probably preaching to the converted, but have you experimented with running up a clone of your site on a fresh WP install elsewhere, or is it just the load that's killing it?

Also, do you use or have you considered using a CDN? I think Yoast had some good things to say about them on his site recently.

Cheers

Re: Fighting The WordPress Dragons

Richard60 — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 18:44:39 -0000

Thanks David, I use Wordpress exclusively for all my blogs, my server is Dreamhost and most of what you wrote about was over my head but I did forward the article to my webmaster

Re: Fighting The WordPress Dragons

cbahm — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 18:35:24 -0000

If a plug-in is de-activated AND removed, does it still leave crap in your wp_options table?

Thx for this post -- good info.

Re: Fighting The WordPress Dragons

Erica — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 18:09:53 -0000

Hi David,

Just wanted to let you know that my boyfriend, Richard, also consults and does this sort of stuff for a living -- tracking down weird code bugs for high-performance sites. I'm sure he would be happy to work with you to figure out the Apache issue. You can reach him @floatingatoll on Twitter or contact me offline and I will get you his contact info!

Re: Fighting The WordPress Dragons

Dave Doolin — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 16:57:07 -0000

I just spent an hour this morning culling plugins. Not done yet either, plan on culling a few more. The admin interface is just too slow. Removing a lot of plugins helped, a little.

Didn't think to check the options table. That will be a next task. I also have a bbPress installation that isn't being used, so that needs to go as well.

Thanks for such a useful post, this definitely will help me speed up my WordPress.

-d