I am still struggling to tweak my blogs performance to handle traffic, and even after upgrading my blogs to all use a Private Server they often have outages (though less than when I was using shared hosting). I have 227MB allocated to my Private Hosting server, though Apache alone and normal system processes consume about 100mb on average, so really this only gives about 100mb or so to handle all the PHP CGI of the 8 blogs I am running on my sites.
Since that memory is shared by all of my 8 wordpress blogs I am running on this site, you can see how when one or more of my sites gets traffic they all consume memory from the same availability pool. The problem appears to be mostly with my Fast CGI PHP and my WordPress plug-ins, though I have trimmed as many I can trim without losing what I consider valuable functionality to my blog, I still have spikes between 30 and 70mb of utilization from the PHP plug-ins.
My hosting provider has told me using performance and load scripts, they can see that any one of my sites suffers outages should I receive just 20 simultaneous connections at the same time, so often I see my outages when I do my Random Twitter Poetry game. I will tweet all 20 or so twitter players about the completed poem, and usually about 10-20 people do click my link and go to my poetry blog at the same time. This combined with normal visits on my other blogs almost always causes me a 15-30 minute outage during the weekdays.
This will only get worse as my blogs continue to gain visitors, I have this problem now with all my blogs averaging a total of 500 – 600 unique visits per day combined, with the occasional spike of up to 1000-1200 visits per day (this is spread across all of my 8 blogs). Dragonblogger.com and Wanderer Thoughts gain the most visits at around 200 unique visits per day each, so I need to continue to figure out how I can tune my PHP scripts and plug-ins or cut them out to try and conserve memory.
Note, I use WP Super Cache, which is supposed to help by caching the page as a static html file, but this doesn’t seem to help much for some reason. I also just enabled xCache on my Fast CGI PHP today hoping to eek out a little more performance.
How many other WordPress bloggers out there have performance trouble with memory and their blogs? What hosting providers do you use, and how much do you pay per month? I am curious if Chris Brogan has these troubles.
-Dragon Blogger
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Tags: Blog memory performance, blog php issues, php cgi memory usage, php cgi performance, php cgi runaway, php fastcgi, php memory leaks, php performance issues, php performance problems, php plugin leaks, wordpress memory issues, wordpress memory leaks, wordpress memory problems, wordpress memory usage, wordpress php performance, wordpress usage issues
August 23rd, 2009 at 11:06 pm
I’m hosted on the Rackspace cloud because my old host had tons of trouble managing my volume. (Disclosure: I’m also an affiliate for their service, but have yet to make a $ off it.)
So far, I don’t have those problems, but I did.
Chris Brogan…´s last blog ..Take 10 Minutes- Meet a Trust Agent
[Reply]
August 24th, 2009 at 7:18 am
Good to know Chris, thank you for visiting my blog, I am honored. I had looked at Rackspace, and was concerned with the cost which was based on usage and volume, does it fluxuate much, or do you pay the same monthly amount? It also seemed like Rackspace had a pretty high minimum cost per month, which I am sure I would be paying if my site received half as much traffic as yours, but right now it would cost more to host than I earn from my blog I think.
[Reply]
August 24th, 2009 at 12:57 am
I use EvoHosting for my blogs/websites, they are quick to respond to any problems, which I’ve only had one in all the time I’ve been with them, and my WordPress blogs have been running like a dream on their servers
Blazing Minds´s last blog ..Review: Skechers Shape-ups, walking on air!
[Reply]
August 24th, 2009 at 7:19 am
Are they a UK hosting provider? Do you run the Google XML Sitemap and All in One SEO plugin?
[Reply]