WordPress is maxing out my server

Well, I figured I would encounter issues when I was converting my blog to a WordPress website, but I didn’t figure it would be this big of a deal.

On Monday night I started having issues with my admin interface. My posts would time out, and the website itself took forever to load. Not only was I losing work, it was frustrating me that I couldn’t be productive. It felt like the whole server was running slow.

Well, turns out my website was crashing the server, timing out the processor overloading it with apache and php requests. My site got taken offline for a day as my host tried to figure out what to do. He first transferred me to a server box with low traffic and few sites hosted on it, but after accessing the admin it acted up again and crashed that server. He then moved it to a higher end box with maybe one other site and got the same result.

Meanwhile, I am reading on what to do. WordPress 2.2.2 came out in the last three days, so I decided that I should upgrade. I may have upgraded to 2.2.1 around the time I was having issues, but I was thinking that was earlier last week. But you never know, that is what could have broke things. A looping line of code that was a bug in the upgrade, I don’t know. I looked in the list of fixes in the 2.2.2 upgrade and didn’t see anything related, but again, it couldn’t hurt.

I also installed WP-Cache with my host’s help, we’ll have to see if that changes things. But so far, most of the posts I have read in the support forums have been about the server being ill configured. There are a significant amount of posts about overloading servers, so now I wish I would have read more into potential issues to watch out for in my switch over. I am committed now with the amount of time I have spent thus far, and the tempting feature upgrade:)

I did read in some posts that shared servers can be a problem, even though it isn’t a requirement to have a dedicated server to host a wordpress blog. Some huge sites from Apple to the New York Times use WordPress, so it should work.

I found out that the server box I was on had 267 virtual domains. That was a good amount, so hopefully now with a switch that will help things.

I also went through the “Presentation” section of the website and first turned off the post tally option for the Archives, and then turned off Archives all together. I haven’t noticed any improvements just yet.

My host says that these are the two lines of code that are executed from 5-7 times per second. Maybe an infinite loop like I mentioned above?

(IP Address) – – [08/Aug/2007:14:19:47 -0400] “GET /wpblog/?cat=56& HTTP/1.0” 200 34797 “-” “WordPress/”
(IP Address) – – [08/Aug/2007:14:19:47 -0400] “GET /wpblog/?cat=63& HTTP/1.0” 200 34797 “-” “WordPress/”

I need help, and I am not sure what to do, but this is hardly something I want to deal with.

Here are some similar arcade posts

• WordPress 2.2.2 still crashing my server
• Moving a WordPress website
• Tutorial for setting up custom permalink structure in WordPress
• Single and Double Quotes – Copy and Paste from Dreamweaver to WordPress
• My Top 5 ‘Must Have’ Plugins for WordPress

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