The site was really slow yesterday and today, and I just disabled one of the ad programs, which seems to have fixed the problem for now. Thanks for hanging in there!
If it gets slow again I will consider switching over to another blogging platform, with the details below, but let’s hope it doesn’t have to come to that.
Technical info: I guess WordPress isn’t meant to handle a lot of traffic and this platform Drupal is supposed to be better. I will do my best to move the site over to Drupal if it starts to slow down again. I tried the wp-cache plugin to take the load off the site, but I can’t get it working, even with the suggested fixes online. It always causes the site to blank out. If you are familiar with this, please e-mail me at info -at- celebitchy.com. I tried to disable php-cache because it’s not compatible with wp-cache or something, and applied the suggested code fixes to wp-cache, but nothing works.
It seems the real problem was that ad program, so let’s hope the site performs better now.
Gahhh, working with drupal makes my brain hurt.
I haven’t looked at your CSS or the source, but it looked like when the page was loading some of the ads / sidebars came up before the content. Of course I could be hallucinating also. On sites I’ve done I’ve tried to get the sidebars to load last.
Feedburner (with the count), blog ads (quite often) and sometimes google can slow down site load time.
Another thing to check out is your mySQL server. If data access speed is the issue Drupal may not be the answer. It, to the best of my knowledge, is a dynamic page rendering system like WordPress. If mySQL Access is the issue, you may consider going with something that generates static pages (Movable Type) possibly.
If you have any questions or there’s anything I can help with shoot me an e-mail.
Thanks Phin I will e-mail you when I get closer to moving the site. I used to run Movable Type and I still have all the templates and stuff. I was thinking of going back to it but I prefer WordPress because it’s so much easier to use and manage. My webhost is telling me that Drupal lets you cache easier and that it’s a good alternative to WordPress, but if it’s really hard to use I don’t want to deal with it.
I would like to know how to set it up so that the sidebars load last. Is it just a matter of where it’s placed in the code? I am a designer and I just set up the CSS so that it lays out properly. I’m sure my code is bloated and leaves something to be desired.
You are doing a great job. Love the site, even when it is slow.
WordPress should be okay with the traffic load. In the past, that was an issue, but since the newest versions have come out, things have been smoother.
You may try repairing databases in the cpanel. That almost always helps me in a pinch.
Gonna email you a link…
Thanks Agent!
I bet it’s everyone googling “Britney Spears cooch” – that’s slowing you down.
yes, that’s why I never published those pictures here. Plus they make me shudder.
Drupal is a great scalable solution, and has several techniques to help speed up systems including caching pages for anonymous users and throttle control to allow you to specify which pages get the majority of the bandwidth. Even though its still in Beta I would recommend you look at Drupal 5.0 though you may wish not to run it on a live site in a test environment you can see if you like it. I have just finished a quick article on my favourite modules for Drupal 5.0 you can find it here
http://ventureskills.wordpress.com/2006/12/01/5-drupal-modules-to-guarantee-drupal-50-success/
Modules are like Addons for WordPress, though even more important for Drupal without them it has little or no functionality.
Thanks so much Venture. I am reading your article now and am going to start working with Drupal this weekend to see what I can figure out about it.