Site performance, Server errors, outages and tunings

[Like Ra]

MySQL writes too much. I noticed that long tine ago, found some wrongly written plugins, but still MySQL writes way too much. One performance metric got on my nerves for years - high percentage of temporary tables created on disk. Increasing the buffer did not help, so I ignored this. However, 3 days ago I stumbled upon this issue again and decided to finally look into it. It turned out that tables with TEXT columns cannot be created in memory. All these three days I've been analysing table structures, calculating the longest entries, removing garbage, replacing text columns with varchar ones when possible and ... suddenly I noticed that almost no temporary tables are being created on disk anymore! And the CPU/memory load is dropped! I would call it a success 😉

I always knew that WordPress (and WP plugins) was not created with performance in mind, but how could I know that it would take me years and years of tweaking and performance tuning... And it's still very resource hungry. MyBB developers have done a better job.

And I still have to rewrite the WordPress theme to conform the latest internal design ideas.

[Like Ra]

Another interesting thing. The CPU load and network traffic dropped significantly 2 days ago when a huge computer botnet was discovered and stopped.

[Like Ra]

Just to give you some real data. This is the blocked SPAM statistics (only blog and only Akismet, Stop Forum Spam software stopped in order of magnitude more SPAM attempts):

       

A bit too much, I should say...

[Like Ra]

Making forum backups and preparing for a big upgrade. In this case it's a long multistep procedure. Everything has to be reverted back (e.g. templates and styles), all plugins should be disabled, reuploaded and retested, all theme files should be rechecked and all changes should be redone. Yeah, I know...

[Like Ra]

As a preparation for the upgrade I have deactivated some not important plugins.

I like the new look

[Like Ra]

I'm not done yet 😉 It can be both good and bad 😁

But the basic functionality is there.

Wahhhhhhh! It's all changed

Going to take some getting used to, but seems to be ok so far.

Have spotted the Icons/emoticons above this post are missing their 'images'  

MJ

[Like Ra]

To be honest, I would leave the previous design, if I could. At least I'd like to change the colours. But the reason behind the upgrade is the internals, that are significantly different from the previous version. Also, no old plugins are supported and they are not reverse compatible. So I would have to upgrade sooner or later. It took me almost 8 month to take a deep breath and jump 😉

Judging by the 'Vertical spread eagle' posting I suspect that the 'view counter' isn't working 😋

MJ