Blog Maintenance

As some of you may have noticed, our blog was under maintenance for a little over a day. Turns out it was using too much CPU and we were notified that our site would be disabled and told us to come up with a plan on lowering our CPU usage.

Our blog will be running with a bunch of features disabled while we investigate how to lower our CPU usage. We have some ideas on how to do this, but the gist of it is WordPress turns out to be a major CPU hog and DreamHost has told us we needed lower our CPU usage. Turns out our blog was using ~15000 CP minutes per day. For comparison, our main catalog library is only using ~300 CP minutes a day.

Our main catalog services 3x the # of visitors a day more than our blog, yet use only 2% of the CPU that our WordPress blog is using.

We already had Hyper Cache and we only had a small set of plug-ins enabled . I have been searching and going through tons of suggestions on how to lower the CPU usage. A couple things we did:

  • Confirmed that our MYSQL DB had the correct caching enabled
  • Verfied settings in Hyper Cache
  • Installed WP-Optimize and optimized the DBs
  • Disabled new comments from being posted (Akismet was catching 5000+ spams a month)
  • Disabled WordPress.com Stats plug-in
  • Disabled Twitter Tools plug-in
  • Disabled Cufón
  • Enabled mod_pagespeed
  • Removed recent comments from our side bar
  • Trying out different lightweight themes (our old theme was making 30-40 queries per page)

If you noticed any issues, please do let us know.

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