I use “WordPress”:http://www.wordpress.org to publish this blog. I like the package, but sometimes it seems more than a little slow. I suspect a big part of the problem is my shared hosting with Pair.com, particularly the mySQL database. As a result, I’m looking at other options for hosting a friends blog. The thing is, I’m really flying blind here.
It would be cool if there were a service that kept performace statistics for WordPress performance at a variety of web hosts. It could watch the ping services (like weblogs.com) to discover blogs, visit them and check for tell-tail signs of wordpress-ness, and then track the performace of the site over time. Statistics could be rolled up using IP addresss and routing info so as to group blogs by web hosting provider. It could also look at the performance information that many WordPress templates include as a comment in the generated page source.
It needn’t be limited to tracking WordPress performance either. It could also track the performance and availability of other common dynamic web applications, like Drupal & PHPbb.
Want a performance tracker? Cut and paste the one at the bottom of any WordPress 2.0 installation into the footer of your pages.
Simply grab this code:
My ISPtook to render this page.
into your footer.php file in your wp-content/themes/your_theme/footer.php file.
That will provide the number of seconds to two decimal places it takes for the server to render each page.
Yes, from what I have read, those of us on shared hosts are paying almost nothing but get crappy performance during peak hours.
Another thing you can do to improve performance is to go into admin | options | reading and check the box to enable gzipping on demand. That will shrink the files you deliver to around 20-30% of the size they are today.
you are going to have to look at the raw message to see the code snippet I left you. Your template ate it.
Thanks. What I’m actually proposing is something that would basically do regular crawls to both discover new wordpress blogs and collect performance data of known wordpress blogs over time and then present an aggregate of that data to interested parties who are looking for the best options for hosting WordPress and other dynamic applications.
My template actually sticks performance data as a comment in the footer, and I’ve noticed a lot of others do as well.
I’ve thought about doing the gzip thing, but that trades CPU for bandwidth, and I think most people on shared hosts are probably CPU bound.