Slow Blog Solution
I set up another WordPress blog yesterday. Its not really a blog, its just a repository for articles that I have accumulated. I am strictly using this for Adsense revenue.
After setting it up I started loading it with articles. Everything was gravy until maybe an hour after the initial setup. The blog started to crawl. I mean it was completely unusable. The counter on the bottom clocked the page loads at around 75 seconds. What could be the problem? I started looking for a solution.
There were bunch of pages discussing the slowness in WordPress. Most of them were because of certain plug-ins. I didn’t install any plug-ins so that eliminated most of my searches. After another 10 minutes of searching around, I decided to play around with the new blog to see if I can come up with a solution.
Here are some things I went through:
- Restarted httpd service – didn’t work
- Restarted mysql service – didn’t work
- Changed the theme to default – didn’t work
- Slam my head on the desk – didn’t work
Having no success was frustrating me and I was seriously ready to just trash the whole thing and reinstall it.
Then, out of nowhere, I had a light bulb go on in my head. If I had no plug-ins installed on this blog, I have missed something very crucial. I didn’t install Akismet. In addition to Akismet blocking spam comments, the trackback spam gets eliminated as well, hence less connections to your blog…hence a more responsive blog. I went ahead and activated Akismet (it took about 5 minutes to navigate to the activation page!!!). Right when I pressed the activate button the blog started acting like any WordPress blog should, fast as hell! Thank you Akismet!
So, if you have never installed WordPress, or if you have installed some; always remember…ACTIVATE AKISMET!!!
28 responses so far
[...] You can read the whole story on his blog. Thanks for sharing Paul! [...]
[...] You can read the whole story on his blog. Thanks for sharing Paul! Share and Enjoy:These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. [...]
Are you saying that on the day you set up your weblog all the spam bots came to you with comments and trackbacks!?
I think that your version of WordPress wasn’t happy without Akismet
Or may be there was a bug looking for Akismet and slowing down your weblog.
Hey, this is interesting info. Ever since day 1, I use Wordpress, I already activated Akismet. I never thought the plugin helps in “hurrying” the page loading. Intersting indeed. Conclusion. Glad I did activated it. haha.
BTW, nice to know u.
That must have been a lot of trackback spam to slow your blog down that much. In any case, Akismet is definitely a lifesaver. I’d never run WordPress without it.
Agreed! Akismet is absolutely fantastic and should be packaged with WordPress from the outset.
- Martin Reed
I don’t think this is true at all. Akismet processes the comments/trackbacks AFTER the comments are submitted (the whole HTTP request), and flags them afterwards. So, still the same amount of connections.
Something like Bad Behavior cuts this off, if I understand BB correctly, thus reducing the load on the server, before it even gets to Akismet.
[...] Paul Benetis finds out (the hard way) how not activating Akismet, now the default plugin with Wordpress Core, can bring your blog to a grinding [...]
Maybe it’s just my mind playing tricks on me, but I activated Akismet, and my blog does now seem a little bit peppyer. I don’t get that many comments and trackbacks, so it doesn’t seem just that aspect could be affecting my speed. What else could it be?
I don’t know if you’ve ever used the plugin Bad Behavior, but it might do the trick as well. I use it in combination with Akismet.
It’s a straight up war between those who want to use their websites and those who want to spam your website.
That’s interesting! It’s the first time I’ve encountered this type of situation and Akismet making blogs work or load faster.
Paul, my comment at the Akismet blog was censored, so I am repeating it here. My point was that you can achieve even more spam-free speed by simply changing the name of the wp-comments-post.php file to something else, and 99% of the spambots will not be able to reach you since they are counting on that file having that name. This is such a simple an effective solution that the only reason it’s not more widely talked about is because Akismet is a for-profit solution. So in a sense, the rename the file solution is to Akismet what herbal remedies are to the pharmaceutical industry — the herbal remedy works just as well, but the pharmaceutical industry wants you to pay for the cure. Renaming the file also absolutely frees server resources, while Akismet needs quite a bit of processing power to run and communicate with their server, etc.
If you combine the renaming of the file with an .htaccess rule banning remote posting of comments (that is, forcing all comments to be made actually at your site), then spam is nearly 99,9% gone, there are very few spamming bots that actually navigate your site to leave a comment.
It’s bad that my comment was censored at Akismet, hopefully you won’t delete this one, as it is meant to be of help.
Thanks
Gonna have to agree with Robin here. Akismet involves more connections – each time a spam comment or trackback is made, the connection is opened as usual, as you can’t know if it’s spam until *after* it comes through. Akismet isn’t an IP blacklist, after all. Plus, you’re opening *another* connection to Akismet to check the comment.
Something else is at play. It cannot logically be fewer connections due to blocking spambots.
Thanks everyone for your comments.
Whatever happened to the blog was slowing it down dramatically. Once Akismet was activated, the blog became normal again. Does that mean that I had spam bots attacking it even though this was its first day? Most likely no. This blog is on the same server and it was working just fine, so the server wasn’t being pegged to its limit. I do not really know what made that blog act like it did. What I do know is, however, is that activating Akismet fixed the issue and it hasn’t come back.
Unlikely story imho, Akismet doesn’t stop bots and other crap from contacting your blog nor from submitting the data, it merely prevents displaying it. If you’d have been talking about Bad Behavior I might’ve believed it as that one actively blocks known bots. I suppose it was something else than Akismet that solved it.
Just because the “slowdown” stopped at the moment you started Akismet, it does not necessarily mean that Akismet was the cure to your slowdown.
Heck, activating Akismet took you five minutes on its own. So many things could’ve happened during that timeframe.
I’m sorry to say but my experience was the opposite. I turned Akismet off and got a big improvement in speed. But now it’s slowed down again, so maybe I should switch Akismet back on!
I have never been able to figure out why wordpress doesn’t default to having askimet running, or REQUIRE that it gets activated before the blog can run. With the level of spammers and scammer out there, it is essential to making a blog run.
As a side note, you can also block out .info/ .pl/ and .ru/ from comments and save yourself a ton of grief… and .edu/ is becoming a real issue as well.
I agree with those who say akismet isn’t the cure. You could try to stop akismet now to see if the problem come up again and then start it again.
If you’ll have the same behaviour there is something related to akismet, but it worth a try, imho.
Sounds like a php, mysql, or server load problem. Have you thought about Caching?
Thanks for the comment/tip.
All other blogs on the same box were performing just fine so it couldn’t have been the Apache settings; therefore, I didn’t even consider caching.
It’d be very worthwhile to study accelerating WordPress itself. I wrote an article on the subject, I hope you find it useful.
I hate these spammers so much. They’re sending so many spams a day. They’ve got bored with sending e-mail spams and it seems they’ve decided to start spamming across into blogs instead.
I saw that there are up to 20 million spams a day blocked on akismet. There are 1.7 trillion spam messages blocked by akismet so far.
I think it’s unacceptable and something should be done against these spammers but the question is what… how can we block them all?
The relevance of Akismet in this case is at best none, and at worst this entire story is a paid advertisement. Akismet is a great spam blocker, it doesn’t need this kind of shady snake-oil PR.
Paul, there is insinuation in your story of Akismet’s “connection blocking” helping speed up your site. Your comments in this thread clearly show that you understand that this is not actually the case, so it would only be fair to prospective Akismet customers that you insert some clarification. As it stands, this story serves only to discredit you and Akismet both.
Vicke,
The post was simply to say that when I activated Akismet, my blog started acting normal again.
Is this shady snake-oil PR? No. I didn’t pay for Akismet, nor do you have to if you want to use it. But, if this post convinced at least one more person to activate this plug-in then I am glad, because the guys made a great tool and its FREE!
As I said earlier, there might have been a coincidence in how the events took place, but it is not going to make me take my post down, so people like you can feel better about themselves proving people wrong.
Regardless if it solved the issue or not, Akismet is great. I’ve been swamped with spam since starting up my blog and am now spam free.
As Paul mentions, it is free so not sure what people are complaining about re the “for profit”, etc. Sure there is a paid solution for enterprises but you need to understand the extreme costs of running a free service. I do ( free service I ran: http://www.infohole.com/blog/about ).
Gordon
very interesting, but I don’t agree with you
Idetrorce
You must also consider using content delivery network – all static server hosted from their network. Less load on your servers. You may also want to do local caching as well.