Maintenance

Written By: - Date published: 12:13 pm, October 16th, 2008 - 9 comments
Categories: admin - Tags: ,

Lynn Prentice

Sysop

There will be some scheduled maintenance at the hosting company tonight between 10pm and 6am. During that period the site may be offline for some short periods.

So if you cannot get the site for a period, then just try again a little time later.

Yet another record breaking day at The Standard yesterday. We keep breaking our own records for numbers of page views and numbers of visitors. The site does seem to be be running better during the peaks since the database tweaking.

9 comments on “Maintenance ”

  1. Unfortunately, wordpress is a dog to optimise. Once you sort out all the bad queries, add indexes for the different things users like to do on your site or for the plugins you have to deal with it’s braindead caching functions!

  2. Vanilla Eis 2

    Lynn: I’d just like to say that the site is looking great (And now formats correctly on the IE6-enforced hell that is work) and to keep up the good work.

    I’m sure we’ll survive with sporadic access overnight on a Thursday.

    captcha: bartender awards – It’s uncanny how many of these actually make sense in English :/

  3. Vanilla Eis 3

    Errr, work-enforced hell that is IE6 would make a whole lot more sense in there. I blame being at work.

  4. Ianmac 4

    What does “captcha ” mean on the base of some posts?

    [you know how you have to enter those two words at the bottom when you make a comment? That’s called captcha. Inevitably, a random system generating two random words is going to come up with some funny or highly appropriate phrases. People sometimes note them at the end of their comments to share the joy. SP]

  5. lprent 5

    Chris: I haven’t found too many problems since 2.5 was released. The number of contraindicated variables in MySQL showing like sorts etc is way down on what it used to be.

    The main thing that I had to do this time around from a clean setup was to play with the key and query settings to tune the site for our loading profiles. Effectively trading RAM for CPU/Responsiveness

    I get quite picky about plugins and do considerable testing. The ones I usually have problems with aren’t at the database side. It is always the Ajax ones because I can’t test all possible client side configurations. It means that people like Anita and rOb have particular setups with Safari on a Mac that the re-edit function doesn’t work on. But they could always use firefox 🙂

    The plugin systems are massively improved in 2.5 and above (about bloody time). They now layer themselves correctly into the call sequences.

    The biggest hassle I’ve had since the start of the year is some maniac malware inserter that has managed to get the site twice. Thought I had it excluded in March, but an attenuated version managed to sneak in a few weeks ago. There is a security hole somewhere in wordpress. But I haven’t been able to isolate it. This time I rebuild the system from scratch again so I ensure that it wasn’t one of my hacks. The site is now hack free apart from some CSS

  6. randal 6

    here is one completely off topic. garth mcrostie and ross mcvicar have been yapping away all year about this and that but now the election is underway they are nowhere to be seen. any opinions on this anybody. they wont be able to be taken serioulsy after this if they dont put up.

  7. You mean Garth McVictim?

  8. Are you restricted to using MySQL with WordPress?

  9. lprent 9

    it: In a default configuration yes.
    However there is quite level of abstraction that theoretically would allow you to use any SQL based system. In practice I wouldn’t like to try.

    http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Alternative_Databases

The server will be getting hardware changes this evening starting at 10pm NZDT.
The site will be off line for some hours.