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Moving Faster…

25 January 2010 7 Comments
Moving Faster…

I think I may have found at least part of the problem with the slowness of this website over the past few weeks. I had to do something drastic: I had to rename my plugins folder then start a new folder called “plugins,” and I’m gradually moving each formerly-active plugin, one by one, to the new plugins folder.

I have zero patience for this, but my patience for the site moving as slow as it has the past few days reaches well into the negative.

So far, one single plugin, “Contextual Related Posts,” which would generate posts from this blog that seemed to be related to the post you were currently reading, caused a major slowdown when it was activated. There may well be others that are guilty, but for now, that one is out the door.

If I can find another plugin that will do the same thing, I’ll give it a shot, because I like the idea of being able to point you to similar subject matter. I’m just not willing to make you wait a week to see it.

Thanks again for your patience as I rebuild the plugin library.

UPDATE:  Broken Link Checker, a useful plugin that determines if links to other sites in old post are still valid, also appears to be slowing things down substantially.  It’s outta here!

UPDATE 2: I’m nearing the halfway mark of reinstalled plugins.  So far, only those two are causing problems, although I’m also taking the opportunity to prune the remaining ones.  I guess this is a sort of spring cleaning a few months early.

UPDATE 3: Without any major changes apparent, I’m now operating on roughly half the number of plugins I had before.  We’ll see how this goes.

7 Comments »

  • Mika Salakka said:

    I’ve been trimming down my blog the past few days as well, as it had gotten horribly slow. I’ve been switching plugins off and on to see what would make a difference. I didn’t find Broken Links to make that much of a difference on my blog, but I don’t have anywhere near as many links to check as you do, so I wouldn’t be surprised if your mileage varied from mine.

    There is a plugin I use called “Yet Another Related Posts Plugin” that matches other posts with the one being read and lists links to a few similar entries underneath it. You can see it in action on my blog. I turned it off momentarily to see if it was affecting the speed of my site, but on my site the difference was negligible. Perhaps it’s worth looking into. I don’t know much about it as I haven’t tweaked it or anything.

    The biggest difference on my blog in terms of speed improvement was made by disabling the Google Analytics plugin that I was using. Not that the information provided by Analytics isn’t interesting, but my blog was really crawling, and is doing considerably better now without it.

    # 25 January 2010 at 11:01 am
  • Patrick (author) said:

    Thanks for the info, Mika…I’ll give the plugin you mentioned a shot.

    What really annoys me is that this happened in a very short amount of time. A couple of weeks ago, all seemed fine. Last week it was a little sluggish. This weekend, it ground to a halt. That kind of slowdown I just can’t tolerate and shouldn’t have to, no matter how much I like a plugin.

    # 25 January 2010 at 1:43 pm
  • Paul said:

    “A couple of weeks ago, all seemed fine.”

    Quite frankly, Patrick, your blog has always been one of the slowest web pages to load that I have ever visited.

    # 25 January 2010 at 5:59 pm
  • Patrick (author) said:

    Well, thanks, Paul. I guess.

    Prior to this latest glitch, I didn’t see that my site — when all is working normally as it seemed to be a few weeks ago — moves substantially slower than most of the blogs I visit. That either means we visit different blogs, or perhaps that my machine behaves differently than yours.

    It’s always been one of the slowest? Always? Really? Even when it was on AOL? And Blogger? And WordPress? That I don’t understand at all. Totally different platforms on totally different servers with totally different layouts over the years shouldn’t have had the exact same result every single time.

    Still, now that I know, I’ll at least try to find ways to speed things along. I just wish I had known sooner.

    # 25 January 2010 at 7:35 pm
  • Paul said:

    OK, so not the old one on AOL. But since then, I visit your page, then sit back and count to fifteen before it loads. And yes, on blogger, and wordpress, and now. If I were you, I’d ditch 98% of the plugins. If people aren’t coming here to read what you write, a few flashy plugins ain’t gonna help. And if people are coming here to read what you write, they ain’t gonna leave if they don’t find a recent comments box, or tag cloud box, or a randomly rotating poll box, or a calendar, or a twitter stream, or a latest video post box, or a random post box, or a month’s top commenters box, or blocked spam counter, or a buy me a cappucino box, or an upcoming posts box…

    # 26 January 2010 at 1:12 am
  • Patrick (author) said:

    Are you on dial-up? Are you still waiting fifteen seconds now? I just opened a new, blank tab, clicked the bookmark for this blog, and the whole thing popped up in under three seconds.

    I’m well aware, Paul, that plugins aren’t going to bring people here who aren’t interested in what I have to say. For people who do come, I’d like to be able to offer them a little something extra BECAUSE they seem interested in what I have to say.

    Not everything you mentioned is generated via plugin. Some of them are basics that are already available without me doing anything. In addition, most of these weren’t there when I was in Blogger. So I can’t explain what the holdup is for you.

    Is anyone else having this big of a delay?

    # 26 January 2010 at 8:49 am
  • Paul said:

    OK, so your site is not loading slowly right now.

    # 26 January 2010 at 9:43 pm

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