high traffic crashing usmagazine.com

  • Resolved willhines

    (@willhines)


    18 years, 7 months ago

    Short version: Looking for performance tips for a high-traffic, high-profile site.

    More details: I’m a web developer working on a web site for usmagazine.com (site of Us Weekly) that’s running on WordPress, based on my recommendation. The staff loved the interface, but high traffic is overwhelming the site. Database errors. There’s other solutions — more powerful server — but WordPress seems to take the heat when I call tech support. I’m trying to save it.

    Any ideas?

    * I’ve installed Wp-cache, but it’s not enough. (Is Staticize a better bet?)
    * Looking into disabling comment counting.
    * There’s no category list or archive list in the sidebar.
    * This is a dedicated virtual server.
    * Traffic ranges from 36,000 to 72,000 sessions a day.
    * MySQL 4.x.
    * Other plugins: Spam Karma, Paged Comment Editing, fl_movie.

    I understand that the problem is high-traffic is beyond optimizing queries and installing plugins. But I’m asking for things like that because those are things I can do in the next few days.

    Lots of good ideas in these forums. An amazing community! WordPress rules. Thanks for any advice.

    ——–
    Errors:

    WordPress database error: [Can’t create/write to file ‘/tmp/#sql_16d8_0.MYD’ (Errcode: 17)]
    SELECT DISTINCT * FROM wp_posts WHERE 1=1 AND post_date_gmt <= ‘2006-04-26 04:29:59’ AND (post_status = “publish” OR post_author = 2 AND post_status != ‘draft’ AND post_status != ‘static’) AND post_status != “attachment” GROUP BY wp_posts.ID ORDER BY post_date DESC LIMIT 0, 10

    Odd side effect: I was mailed a backup of the database about 45 times before I disabled the backup and wp-cron plugin.

Viewing 6 replies - 46 through 51 (of 51 total)

  • Glad to see more specific instances of particular resources helping manage load. Keep it up everyone! ??

    Thread Starter willhines

    (@willhines)

    We might have saved WordPress for usmagazine.com. We’ve moved to a beefy dedicated physical server. 2 gig of RAM and only the one site on the box. We don’t run any email on this guy (we didn’t run any on the last one, but we weren’t the only site on the box).

    The IT rep is still in favor of MT, but I’ve argued that the simpler interface is a reason to stay with WP. Plus I kinda begged, because it’s so much easier to tweak and develop in PHP and with WordPress’ plugin system. We’re staying WP for now.

    He says he’s enabled query caching — a built in feature of MySQL 4.x? He made these changes to the my.cnf file:

    old_passwords=1
    set-variable = max_connections=250
    query-cache-type = 1
    query-cache-size = 256M

    Plus we still have WP-Cache running.

    I’m staying on the blog authors about keeping posted images down to size, and I’m redoing the front page to get the Flash files off of it.

    And we have that 2 gig of RAM.

    I guess the next step would be some kinda low-level PHP caching component.

    We discussed lighttpd — and we’re trying to avoid setting up a custom-installed box. The out-of-the-box setups here have Plesk control panels managing everything and he’s hesitant to give that up for lighttpd and the work of installing/maintaining a custom config.

    Earlier, I cited 36,000 to 72,000 sessions a day. I found out that on the day we crashed, we recorded 230,000 sessions. That spike is what killed us. Pray for me if Jessica Simpson kisses someone in public and we get a picture.

    Thanks again for all the great advice. I’ve said it a bunch, but obviously having such a caring community is a priceless asset. I hope to pay it back — maybe with a slick, powerful site running WP.

    Best of luck to you Will. I hope you report back here to let us now how things work out for you.

    It sounds like you’ve got some more breathing room now. It’s still important to make it run as efficiently as possible, so you don’t outgrow the new box too soon. I’ve found I often ‘forget’ the problems I’ve had when the spike is gone and things are cruising fine again. If I don’t continue to make efforts to watch and improve efficiency, it comes back and bites me in the rump. I hope you don’t fall into that trap!

    Oh, and this says a lot right here ->
    <!– Dynamic Page Served (once) in 0.366 seconds –>
    <!– Cached page served by WP-Cache –>

    btw, anything happening with Tom Jones lately? ??

    Just want to add as of August 2006 the said site’s still running WP (2.0.1).

    Thread Starter willhines

    (@willhines)

    I forgot I was only at 2.0.1 – I have to upgrade that.

    But that is correct, akc. We upgraded servers and that solved a lot of our problems. We went to a dedicated server (actual physically dedicated server, not a virtually dedicated one) with 2 gig of RAM. Even that was getting slammed so we went to 3 gig of RAM, and now we’re working on putting a load-balanced solution into place (2 web servers with MySQL on its own box).

    In short: WP-Cache, getting a ton of RAM, and letting MySQL have huge chunks of RAM were the main things that saved us. Also, the authors like the clean interface so I got some others to help me lobby to keep WP in place.

    The site is probably going to be featured on Good Morning America tomorrow (8/3/2006), so we’re bracing for a spike. Cross your fingers for me.

    Some have found Apache 2 and PHP to be slower than Apache 1.3.x… you could consider a switch unless you need something in Apache 2.

    Also take a look at squid for caching. In some cases that can be much quicker than just caching from within wordpress, since you still need to create an apache/php request. Not sure how much millage you’d get, but might be worth looking into.

Viewing 6 replies - 46 through 51 (of 51 total)
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