Notice a drag in the action lately? Have you been getting the database error a little too often? Time-outs? Memory overloads?
Everything associated with Bloodhound Realty runs on a dual-core Xeon box. All by itself, no shared users. We have the whole server to ourselves. Two processors, two big disk drives, gigahertz ’til it hurts.
And we’re maxing it out in peak hours.
BloodhoundBlog has thousands of RSS subscribers, and we serve our own feeds. In the long run I might have to bite the bullet and sign up for a third party feed service like everyone else.
But there is another big problem that I’m making an effort to cure today:
BloodhoundBlog gets hit with spam comments around 5,000 times a day. Almost all of these are caught by Akismet, but each one is a strain on the MySQL database — the very chokepoint that’s getting maxed out.
So effective now, I’ve cut off all comments for posts over two weeks old. I hate having to do this, because sometimes pure gold turns up in a comment on an older post — and our archives are ripe with gold in any case. But the spammers are looking for juice, and older posts are where the juice is to be found.
I hate having to do this, but swatting at flies only gets you so far. Eventually you have to rob them of their food supply.
My apologies. But: Let’s hope this speeds up the action on the live conversations.
ryan hartman says:
Come on everyone…. send Greg a dollar so he can get some super souped up fancy hosting somewhere.
The comments are the best thing about this thing… 🙂
March 11, 2009 — 9:51 am
Greg Swann says:
> The comments are the best thing about this thing…
The action normally wanes within five or six days. If I see us stretching out further than that, I extend the time limit.
> send Greg a dollar so he can get some super souped up fancy hosting somewhere.
We’re Hostgator.com, but we’re actually hosted at ThePlanet.com. We’re $219 a month right now, but if we really hit a wall, I may split the content. I’ve deliberately been building everything new in such a way that it can be moved easily with a DNS change.
Sprightly today. Let’s see if we’ve made a difference.
March 11, 2009 — 10:26 am
Trace says:
You aren’t kidding Greg:
You don’t have wp-super-cache only wp-cache, why is that?
That would be my first switch… a no brainer.
Second switch, I would move from apache to lightspeed (not litehttpd)… that alone could solve your problems….. many find it an cost effective way to hardware upgrades …
Other options, I don’t believe hostgator offers RAID (could be wrong) … moving to a flavor of RAID can also help…and of course optimizing mysql ….if you haven’t already….
March 11, 2009 — 10:37 am
Brad Coy says:
I have noticed the drag.
fwiw- some things I don’t get around to reading but 3 weeks or longer after they are posted. for the trade, I’d rather see the site run more efficiently. 5k per day in spam is awful!
March 11, 2009 — 10:39 am
Trace says:
ooops got stripped out from above
You’re not kidding Greg: ( — Dynamic Page Served (once) in 15.606 seconds )
March 11, 2009 — 10:40 am
Cheryl Johnson says:
I have noticed a significant increase in spam comments on old posts in the last few days on most of my sites. Must be a new mutant fly out there.
March 11, 2009 — 12:04 pm
Greg Swann says:
> Must be a new mutant fly out there.
Not one spam comment since 9 am… I picked up maybe 25 extra minutes in my day.
March 11, 2009 — 12:17 pm
James Boyer says:
Good move Greg, I have been getting slammed on my blogs as of late also. For some reason Akisment is not taking care as it used to.
March 11, 2009 — 2:30 pm
James Boyer says:
Not quite sure what has happened Greg, but I have noticed that if i make a comment it does not show up anymore? Have I been banned?
March 11, 2009 — 3:29 pm