Introduction

I’m a born twiddler.  Even though something works quite happily, I’ll try something else.

So it was yesterday. In an effort to improve the ‘user experience’ and promote a bit of feedback on this website, I’ve been twiddling with various plugins.

Caching for Speed

Some time ago I changed caching methods from Donncha’s WP Supercache to Dmitry’s Db Cache.  To be fair, there wasn’t much in it, especially then.

• One reason was probably my sympathy for the little man!  Donncha’s plugin is heavily plugged (pun intended), and even though that’s because he’s a good programmer and the tool has super ratings, I still thought I’d give something else a go.
• Another reason is the “emperor’s new clothes” effect!  Donncha is part of the core WP personnel and in my long and flawed life I’ve come to observe the obsequious nature of people in the most unlikely of places!  So to eliminate that, it seemed fair to try alternatives.  This is something I continue to do – i.e. not trust anyone’s word fully until I’ve tried or observed it myself.  (Heroin is like this – it’s obviously crap by observation; I can see the effect on lives and society so I don’t need to test it.  Beer is a different matter though…)

Now

I’m not an expert, but I understand the arguments behind the two methods of caching.  The query caching has actually worked very well, until yesterday.  Then, all the plugin twiddling I was doing coincided with a big pile of hits (for me!) at about 21:00 GMT, mainly sourced from http://whatreallyhappened.com/ and other linked pages.  I was getting about one every 3 secs at one point.

Then the website fell over.

I struggled to turn off plugins – my plugin permutation testing strategy now being consigned to a future date – and wondered what was happening.  The database was alive but returning failed access.  So I eventually went to bed!!

Today, I’ve gone back to WP Super Cache, cleaned out all duff caches I can find, turned off a few plugins and tested using http://ismyblogworking.com/.   Well it is!

And very nippy it is too! (for me that is… as I said, I love twiddling and I love gadgets, and I’ve probably got way too many running for dedicated web purists – but that’s me!)

Conclusion

Never, ever, be afraid to experiment.  All I’ve lost is few hits which in the scheme of the wider universe is pretty pathetic.  But I’ve learned so much more.  I’ll possibly go into this another time.  But for now, it appears that Donncha’s WP Super Cache is super!  The problems I had some months back were a combination of other things, and to some extent they are on-going.  I’m not the first person, and I know I won’t be the last to be drawn down the wrong path when troubleshooting.  The issue of my webhost is starting to come back again.  I’ve checked out different hosts in my price band (actually that means as cheap as it’ll go…!) and they are all much the same.  People are actually having much worse downtime rates than me among all the major players in this part of the market when I’ve checked forums etc.  So that’s still to be looked at and decided upon…hmmm.  Should I pay (a lot) more for a better service or just sit…..?

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