Slow blogs and frustration

By sovknight | February 21, 2008

I’m back!  Did you miss me?  Probably not.  I haven’t written in a while, for a couple of reasons.  First and foremost, I’m lazy.  That’s a pitiful excuse I know, but it’s getting harder and harder to get motivated every day.  I need to make a change in my recently acquired lifestyle before it drives me insane.  Laziness is unbecoming, and it’s a horrible way to live.

The primary reason though, is technical.  My blog is incredibly slow.  When I click on the URL, it takes an average of anywhere between 30 to 130 seconds to load.  More often than not, it takes about a minute.  Sometimes it times out completely and won’t load at all.  This is unacceptable, and I can’t seem to figure out what’s causing it.  What makes it worse is that it’s not an every time occurrence.  Numerous Google searches have indicated this problem is relatively common among Wordpress blogs, so I did searches for the fix that would hopefully end my frustration.  Alas, it has still alluded me.

Consensus points to several factors that could be the cause.  However after going through each of these several times, I’ve pretty much ruled them all out.  I deactivated all of my plug-ins, although I really don’t have that many running, changed my template back to the default, and cleaned up any bad links or spam that might have sneaked through.  Nothing helped.  I read several articles on using  a cashing system to serve the pages more quickly, but I think the problem is initially either with the server, or my MSQL database, and any amount of cashing won’t help that.  I’m pretty much stuck at this point.

I’ve already talked to my web host, and they insist there’s no problem.  “Your page loads fine.” they tell me, yet when I click to go to it or administrate any administrative duties, it’s slower than Rosie O’Donnell in the 400 meter hurdles.  What do they know?  I’ve been looking into other web hosts, but to be honest, other than the issues of late with the blog, I’ve never had any problems with my current host and they have a pretty good hosting deal.  If it’s not the server itself (and I suspect it’s not, because I host another page on the same server and it’s fine), I’m left with fussing with my MSQL database, which is a frustrating and overly-technical process.  Ugh, I wish things were just easy sometimes.

If I could ask a favor, would y’all leave a comment and let me know how my page loads for you?  I need to nail this problem down.