Do large numbers of drafts in the WP database slow YARPP?

Sorry to hear about this. ?? The relatedness computation that YARPP does is indeed slightly computationally heavy, but that’s why it gets the great “relatedness” that it does. In addition, YARPP caches its results in the database, so it doesn’t have to recompute all the time.

Here are some things which may help.
– there are some hints on more computationally-efficient settings in the FAQ.
– Install YARPP Experiments, another plugin which adds some extra settings. In particular, I suggest you use “the throttle” to make it so that things won’t crawl when you clear the YARPP cache and all your visitors suddenly come to pages which need YARPP’s computation. YARPP Experiments also lets you manually build up the cache, for example in the middle of the night or over a weekend, when your traffic is lower.
– Drafts are not considered, so I don’t think that’s an issue here.

There are many sites running YARPP with significantly more than 160k visitors a month. Is this on a shared hosting provider? Another host or service level with a higher capacity MySQL database may be what’s needed.

I hope this helps.

Hi Michael,

Good News– I don’t think the problem is YARPP. Hostgator is very quick to blame YARPP but when I turned it off for 10 days based on their recommendation, the problem persisted. We REALLY like YARPP and are not willing to give it up so easily.

Incidentally, the site was over 98% cached by YARPP already so I doubt we would have had any significant slowdown from it.

I think the problem might be Hostgator and I plan to change hosts later this week so I can find out. I think something about their configuration is inefficient. I thought there was a host that was said to be more likely to handle YARPP well on large sites. I’ll have to look again, but I think it was Media Temple… If you have another thought, let me know.

Thanks again and we do love your plugin!

Michael