We have had several times in the last 6 months that the site has basically gone down due to search engines spidering the site. They drove the traffic so high that the server couldn't handle it. So I have installed a caching module that should allow all unlogged in viewers of the website to view cached pages that serve up much faster than when the webserver has to pull the page from the database each time it is viewed.
How this will affect you? If you log in you shouldn't notice any difference as you will be getting the current database version of the pages. However if you would like to gain some performance benefits you can make sure you are not logged in and you can view pages. If they are in the cache then they should load much faster.
I'm not totally sure how this will work in reality so give me your feed back over the next few weeks as we try this out. Is it working? Not working? Why not? Any weird issues you are now having?
Scott
Hi Scott,
I hope everyone on the other side of the world is well.
I'm not sure if your changes may have caused a delay but it seems that the whole site is really really slow to load any pages and has been since about the time of your post. Logging in doesn't seem to change anything and I don't have any issues with any other web sites.
Do you have any ideas why I might be experiencing these delays or how I might be able to fix them? I do use Windows vista (I know, I know) and will soon be changing to Windows 8 so that may help, but it just seems odd that I only have a problem with the DE website.
All the best,
David.
David,
I hadn't posted on this yet but actually the site has been down since yesterday afternoon here till early afternoon today. Almost 24 hours.. The site runs on a virtual web server and I shut it down to move it from the old physical server to a newer one. You will notice that already the site is much faster than it was. Hopefully it will be even faster once I get in the ram to bump the server from 4 gigs to 32 gigs in the next week or so. The server is running other virtual severs and ram is the limiting factor at the moment.
The virtual server the website is on also serves up about 5 other websites and on the old server over the last year or so the performance has been extremely poor. Mostly due to the database server running on it also. I can dedicate more processor cores and ram to it on the new server. Like I said you should be seeing a bit of a performance increase already. You should see another in a few days. I'm sorry I didn't warn anyone that the site would be down but the opportunity to move to a new machine happened suddenly and I had to do it right then. We recently upgraded the upstream data bandwidth on the internet connection also. Hopefully this will all be adequate for a long time to come 🙂
I also upgraded the operating system both on the physical and virtual servers at the same time I did the physical move for the virtual server, so it has been a busy couple days for me.
As always when I do such major changes please, anyone, let me know if you notice anything wrong or have issues.
Scott Carle
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