Something has to be done about the website. Either WordPress needs to be replaced, or I need a new provider.
Any suggestions?
Reader Interactions
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Come for the politics, stay for the snark.
I really should read my own blog.
Within six months Twitter will be fully self-driving.
Let’s not be the monsters we hate.
My years-long effort to drive family and friends away has really paid off this year.
Conservatism: there are people the law protects but does not bind and others who the law binds but does not protect.
Bad news for Ron DeSantis is great news for America.
Bad people in a position to do bad things will do bad things because they are bad people. End of story.
When the time comes to make an endorsement, the pain of NYT editors will be palpable as they reluctantly whisper “Biden.”
American History and Black History can not be separated.
Let there be snark.
He really is that stupid.
with the Kraken taking a plea, the Cheese stands alone.
Even though I know this is a bad idea, I’m off to do it anyway!
They’re not red states to be hated; they are voter suppression states to be fixed.
You cannot shame the shameless.
Republicans firmly believe having an abortion is a very personal, very private decision between a woman and J.D. Vance.
“I never thought they’d lock HIM up,” sobbed a distraught member of the Lock Her Up Party.
Give the craziest people you know everything they want and hope they don’t ask for more? Great plan.
‘Museums aren’t America’s attic for its racist shit.’
Shut up, hissy kitty!
“Let’s not pretend [Trump] wants to engage in high-minded discourse.”
Trump’s legal defense is going to be a dumpster fire inside a clown car on a derailing train.
This isn’t Democrats spending madly. This is government catching up.
“What are Republicans afraid of?” Everything.
Sirkowski
Do like RedState and become a welfare queen.
cleek
which version of WP are you using ?
my site doesn’t get anywhere near the traffic you do, but i’ve never seen that WP error page on it (or on any other WO site, frankly). maybe a new host is in order?
FWIW, i’m on LunarPages, using WP 2.2.x.
Keith
Blame it on liberals being better programmers, and ask for $25k in handouts.
Lee
Get rid of WordPress it cannot handle large loads.
Many aggregator sites will not link to sites using WordPress because they know it will crash.
jrg
Email the WordPress developers, demanding that they fix your site for free. Then, when they refuse, claim that it’s a conspiracy against you because they don’t like the contents of your blog.
But seriously… I’ve noticed this tends to happen when you get linked from places like Salon. Maybe you could have them link to a mirror instead.
Countervail
WordPress just upgraded to 2.5. Would that work?
Rick Taylor
Agreed. i wrote a post three times before it took. I’ve got to get in the habit of using a word processor to save before posting.
demimondian
Seriously, John — this isn’t the audience to ask. You might ping GOS and ask him to ask ct what a good choice for you might be at your scale and with your resources — they won’t know themselves, but I’ll bet they’ll know who’ll know.
Caidence (fmr. Chris)
Damn it, I got in here to push the RedState/liberals shit, and it’s already out 5 posts in. Foo.
The stie is actually not that bad, if you ask me. Many geeks like me prefer sites that are very simple. It’s the simplicity that allows things like the pie filter to be easily created. Also, I can read this site on the Links browser if I want.
I just wish it were less insane to comment. Like, surrounding tildes mean ~subscript~. Why?
Caidence (fmr. Chris)
Oh, if we’re talking about up-time down-time, then you’ve got yourself a hell of a project which I know nothing about.
jake
I can help you but first I’ll need 25k and a new gas grill. Fork it over or the terrists will win.
cbear
Any of you professional internetters know why whenever I spend much time here at BJ, esecially in comments, my computer slows to a crawl and my cpu usage in Task Manager goes way up?
Alan
I’d go to a host that specializes in dynamic content, like EngineHosting. The only drawback with them is you have to deal with an actual person to get things set up. There’s no cpanel. Of course, to some people that’s a plus.
cleek
cbear, which browser are you using ?
are you using any plugins or Greasemonkey scripts ?
Lee
If you use packaged software, it will probably not be that bad.
The workflow would be something like:
1. Work with new software to get layout similar to what you have now.
2a. Make a copy of the entire existing site.
2b. Save a copy somewhere.
3. Point new software to the copy to pull in all old posts.
4. Bug check.
5. If errors, Make a new copy (from the saved copy) and repeat from #3.
6. Once happy with results, make a final copy of the site.
7. Run new software against production version of site.
8. Cross fingers
9. Publish.
cleek
OT: Clinton Parables
Davebo
It’s always a database connection error, yet the database resides on the same machine as the web server!
It’s your host IMO, get rid of them if you can. Hell, I’ll host this site for free for a little bit of that PJ add space.
Jen
you got a h/t from Glennzilla, I assume that had something to do with it. I suggest you revert to boring, low-grade wingnuttery, and start deleting comments, and that will take care of these traffic and linking problems.
I kid, I kid. Definitely something new is needed.
And if anyone is in central NC and can volunteer time to do any of the following things:
1. Configure a wireless network
2. Configure a network IP printer
3. Setup said printer on workstations
4. General troubleshooting of Internet connectivity issues.
the new Obama office needs your love.
UncommonSense
Blogger works well for me, but I only get about 50 hits a day, so anything would probably work well for me.
Lee
The tubes are clogged connecting to The Googles.
Caidence (fmr. Chris)
i lawled.
The “how about you let me win”, “Why?” should’ve been followed with “Because it’s my turn to win”
Tim (the Other One)
Take it as a sign that your place is starting to happen.
protected static
John —
Do you use the WP-Cache plugin? That’ll probably help.
To me it sounds more like a hosting issue than a WP issue… For a pretty in-depth discussion of this & related issues, see here…
cbear
cleek-
Tx.
I’m using IE. No “greasemonkey” scripts, although I don’t have any clue what that is.
funfunfun
one option is moving to MT 4, which looks confusing out of the box, but can output flat pages so that each pageview is less overhead on your server.
there are lots of other options for speeding up WP, though- look into (or ask your host for extra-special help and give ’em a banner in the sidebar to say thanks) the following: memcached, mysql query caching, and WP’s built-in cache.
Keith
On my Vista/IE7 machine, that’s a sure sign of Adobe Flash Player going nuts via ads (although it kills me the most at Huffingtonpost, but never here)
Woodrow "asim" Jarvis Hill
I’d second MT 4 — I switched myself, recently (click my URL to see my MT-hosted blog). It’s default is to use static pages, not dynamic, which means MUCH less resource utilization, and thus ability to survive these big hits.
OTOH, it can be a baroque piece of software to work with, and the community support is far smaller than WP’s. And as others have mentioned, something like WP-Cache can help out a lot.
Punchy
Bra and Panties Publishing having problems posting polysyllabic opinions from pissed-off posters?
Billy K
The topic is how the site dies for about an hour every day, not the, um…”spartan” design aesthetic.
My .02, John: I think this whole “blog” thing is done to death. You should “think outside the box,” and find a new way of being published. Maybe in some kind of large, daily collection of printed pieces by different authors, focusing on the news of the day. News in paper, if you will.
Evinfuilt
Just swapped from MoveableType to WordPressMu, and I’ll never look back. The static/dynamic mixed state in MT isn’t very strong under load (and if you get spammers, kiss your box good bye.)
My bet is your provider is your main problem right now. Check into the WP-Cache, it could help, but I wouldn’t think about swapping platforms.
jrg
Jen,
I might be able to help with the wireless network. Normally I don’t do desktop-type support, but I can probably swing it. Please email me at hobbiemonkey at gmail . Com. This is a scratch email address I never check, but I will in the next couple of hours. Thanks.
wingnuts to iraq
John, tried to send you an email about this but it just bounced back! Is that email listed on the right hand part of the page correct?
ThymeZone
Don’t ask me. I just bitched to a certain mailing list the other day about crappy software, and they basically responded:
1. Oh yeah? You think you can write better software?
2. Fuck you
3. I dunno, my stuff is running okay
If you like, I can put you in touch with them. Just let me know.
These problems you are experiencing are just one of many reasons I’d never try to run a real blog on my own. It’s way too much work. If money from us will help, let me know, I am glad to pitch in.
Just Some Fuckhead
It’s WordPress.
Cris
I’ll add to the chorus of voices that the problem is your host, not your blogging software per se. But I will agree with protected static (and others) that you can do things to reduce resource usage, such as WP-cache. See also Eliott Back’s entry on the subject.
protected static
Someone said something about the database being on the same box as the web server – that’s not necessarily true. On DreamHost my blogs’ MySQL server is on a totally different machine…
Just Some Fuckhead
Now that I think about it, it’s most likely your host.
Godzilla's best friend, Herny Stalwart the 3rd
Download, install, active wp-cache
Alan
If Balloon-Juice’s host uses cPanel then the site is using the same box for the database and email.
sujal
second Cris and protected static:
Install WP-Cache and make sure you’re on a recent or the latest version of WordPress. WP-Cache makes a HUGE difference and it finally has all the right hooks so that comments show up right away, etc.
Also, force all of the RSS/Atom feeds to go through FeedBurner. I notice you still have the badges in the sidebar pointing at the feeds hosted through WordPress directly even though you have feedburner set up. RSS, especially for sites hosted on weak hosts, can be a killer because there’s a lot of noise traffic.
FeedBurner makes a plugin that can help automate that transition so that people still pointing at the old feeds get redirected to FeedBurner.
For those that claim WordPress can’t handle the load, that’s simply not true. The trick is to be smart about setting it up. I know of what I speak… I used to run the software engineering team behind espn.com. WordPress (with WP-Cache) does some of the same things we used to do to handle heavy loads.
You could also consider moving to a fully hosted solution at WordPress.com. They allow custom domains but I don’t think you could pull your theme over. I could be wrong about that, though.
Sujal
Happy WordPress user from the days when it was still called B2
sujal
never mind the WordPress.com thing. I forgot about your Pajamas Media stuff.
ThymeZone
Hmm. I don’t know what kind of traffic this blog is seeing, nor do I know what kind of hardware they are running it on …. but based on what I see here every day on a smallish but very busy enterprise-class system that exposes many terabytes of data to a few thousand heavy users …. heavy users with very bad attitudes …. heavy users with dark attitudes who can fu(k you BAD if you piss them off ….
I can’t imagine that it can be that hard to support this blog with high performance and good availability. If we need new hardware and such, let’s do some fundraising and get it.
How performant is MySQL? I can hammer a SQL Server database night and day with thousands of transactions a minute, in a three-level replication scheme (each write to the original database is replicated in real time to two other instances of the database, one onsite and one offsite). The replication is bitwise, which means that every bit written to the primary disk is also written out to the secondary and tertiary disks. The IO load on this thing is daunting, and it never burps. All of this on off-the-shelf Dell equipment and Windows OS. This thing pumps more data in a few mins than this site can possibly do in 24 hours, and it never hiccups. In fact it rarely even strains the resources that support the SQL Server database.
So … what’s up with this site? What are we running it on?
protected static
In a forward-cursor, read-only situation, it kicks ass. It’s great for DHTML, hence its role as the ‘M’ in the LAMP stack. In a high-transaction environment, it stumbles when compared to commercial offerings but a.) we really aren’t talking about a high-volume OLDP environment for a blog, and b.) the ‘free beer’ aspect of MySQL appeals to a lot of people more than the ‘free speech’ aspects of it.
Me, I’ve always been a little suspicious of people who denigrate the appeal of free-as-in-beer. Either they don’t drink enough beer, or they sponge off their friends who do… :-)
demimondian
TZ — the way you make MySQL scream is to partition your db and buy cheap hardware. You make MSSQL scream by driving your hw hard (because the licenses are spendy) and you do all the delicate, touchy, difficult optimizations. That’s fine, if your willing to baby the resulting system, but it’s fragile. It’s cheaper, in the long run, to use MySQL/PostgresQL in a less tuned form (where, say, you’ll only be getting 80-90% of the throughput) on hardware which costs a third as much and implement health monitoring, backup, and fail-over.
It’s how people like me sleep through the night.
Just Some Fuckhead
I’m just glad I’m a commenter and not a blogger. The only technical shit we have to do is periodically refill the keyboard with beer.
jag
I run a site based on WordPress that gets about 80,000 users a day… never had a problem with it. It’s probably something to do with your theme and plugins.
jag
btw, downloading wp-cache does help.
Ninerdave
Let me tell ya how I make my wife scream!….heh!
Davebo
When the error page says that the server cannot connect to the database on localhost it’s a sure sign that the web server and db server are on the same machine.
And yes, SQL Server, or Oracle if you want a dump truck are vastly superior to MySQL. But I just don’t see this site needing either in anything other than a Digg worst case scenario.
Hell if it’s a wintel server you could probably just use Access as a data server and you’d be OK.
Not trying to diss Balloon Juice here, but let’s be real. There is no way you’re getting 60 hits per minute is there?
Dennis - SGMM
Do we have anything bigger than a 240?
protected static
By partitioning her and buying cheap hardware?
protected static
(sorry, that link needs an NSFW tag…)
BH Buck
John, WP-CACHE is exactly what you need. I was getting those database error pages off and on at BlueHerald. But once I installed wp-cache, all is great.
As it is right now, every time someone opens a page on your site, the page is dynamically created, with calls to your database being made. With wp-cache, only when content of your site changes, (or after a set time, which you control yourself), will your content be dynamic (and slow). Other than that, the page will be cached and served up statically, which is much more efficient (and quick)
Will make a big difference.
Also, while using wp-cache, a quick check of your source code, near the bottom, you’ll see new info regarding the loading of your pages, similar to this:
<!– Dynamic Page Served (once) in 0.649 seconds –>
<!– Cached page served by WP-Cache –>
BH Buck
Whoops!
Like this:
(!– Dynamic Page Served (once) in 0.649 seconds –)
(!– Cached page served by WP-Cache –)
BH Buck
Another idea would be to consider using a third-party commenting service, like Haloscan or Disqus.
Haloscan can be temperamental at times but I understand Disqus (Americablog uses them) is a pretty good service.
Doing this would greatly reduce the drag on your server and database.
srv
John,
1) Offer one of the experts above a blogging slot, since all the other serfs you let in obviously have no expertise to help you.
2) Alternate backgrounds for every other post. It just isn’t fun anymore going through 252 posts and I give up.
BettyPageisaBlonde
I’ll just second (er, 32nd) the wp-cache plugin. Also the host bit.
Which means that other than playing some kind of fucked up Internets Rules of Order, I have nothing to add.
jcricket
You make MSFT scream by installing Linux and another database, like Oracle, Postgres or MySql :-) I say bleh on MSSQL, and I’ve seen all the databases.
I second that wp-cache is probably the easiest thing to try and do for John.
ThymeZone
Bacially by installing it. It takes less handholding and config than any such product I have ever used. It runs fast and is reliable as a rock.
That’s why we use it. Put it on a performant server, by itself, and stand back.
ThymeZone
Heh. Not hardly. Eight years into full time SQL Server DBSA and I can say I have not spent even 5% of my time on such activities. No need to.
Proper database design and query construction take care of most performance issues. If a DBA or DBSA spending a lot of time on “touchy difficult optimizations” then she is doing something wrong.
lee
After reading the thread, here is what I would do.
Install WP Cache (hopefully the cost is incidental), contact WP to make sure you have it configured correctly.
If your site crashes again, you can either offload your comments to a third-party provider or go with new blogging software.
I’d lean toward new blogging software, but I’m not a big fan of WP’s performance.
PaulW
You could always go back to html webpages.
Andrew J. Lazarus
Postgres has been rock solid for me. MySQL is rumored to be faster in situations that require none of complex queries, near-complete ANSI conformance, and MVCC. That probably holds true for blogs, but I have never thought about it deeply.
At this point, I don’t think I would go commercial even with an unlimited budget. And if I did, it would probably be to evaluate an OODB, like Caché.
The Other Steve
I think the problem really is the host. I don’t quite understand why you keep getting these errors of being disconnected from mySql. Is the mySQL server crashing? Is it just connectivity?
The Other Steve
Yeah, our SQL Server machines are rock solid. Our DBAs spend most of their time just managing backups and deploying new stuff.
ThymeZone
Heh, well, don’t even get me started on that subject.
Disaster recovery, business continuity, hotsites, high availability audits, first responder troubleshooting every time anything breaks because the kids all know that the DBA is more likely to know which way to go to find the problem than anyone else (he has a wider system view of the landscape than the developers or the operations people) ….. and the meetings, and the budget problems, and ……
aaaaaaaaaaaggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
Original Lee
Just a thought – how about the Robot9000 from xkcd? Judicious use would get rid of a lot of the trolls.