Downtime

Some of you might noticed the blog went down and up a few times today. The reason for that is I had a problem with the server. I’ve actually been having a problem for around a month now, the site was feeling sluggish and it was going down often for a few minutes at a time. Well thanks to the Rackspace technicians where my server is hosted, they managed to find the problem.

Because the blog gets so many visitors a day small issues are big issues and in my case it turned out my “Related Posts” plugin was the small issue that turned big. You might have noticed before that when you click on a post, right below it you would find a section called “Related Posts” which would contain links to previous posts on a similar subject. Well the previous plugin I had that created those links stopped working so I installed another one around a month or so back. Turns out the new plugin I installed wasn’t programmed properly which resulted in the plugin using all my server resources to the point where the server was becoming unresponsive and required a reboot every so often hence the down times.

How bad was the plugin? The server resource utilization dropped from 121.82 load average down to 0.60 load average just by disabling it! That’s a humongous difference. So now the server is back to normal, it’s a lot faster and more responsive. I’ve also installed Super Cache as well so that should also take the load off from the server.

Everything should now be better than normal.

Update: Just realized why the server went to hell all of a sudden today and not earlier. Turns out the rumor about Jackie Chan passing away came back to life today. Since I’ve previously posted about it I got around 10,000 people come in from google using the search term jackie chan passed away since my link comes up first.