I've been having an increasing lack of performance in my server (slowness, stalling on page loads, largely backend issues where I spend most of my time) over the past month or two on what is primarily a standard blog. The site gets 20k hits a day though I even have these issues on weekends when traffic is lower as well.
Current host/setup:
- Knownhost VS3 (VPS) / Apache / RAM: 1216 MB
- Optimizations: WP Super Cache & Cloudflare (CDN)
- Memory usage typically at 15-20% / Hard Drive: 50% of 60GB
I tried uninstalling Super Cache & installing W3TC. That brought some additional issues including finding out the hard way that we couldn't enable object caching.
Server issues have been ongoing for the past couple years with a few different companies. It's not new/recent, just getting worse.
My main question is whether the plugins I have enabled could be creating these problems as my host suggests & if so, how do I reduce the number of connections? PConnect is not a possibility where I need caching.
See the host's message below...
Please verify the number of apache connections to the plugins in the domain:
---
root@host [~]# sh plugins.sh
70869 jetpack
241234 mailchimp
5099 shadowbox-js
206378 slidedeck-lite-2-for-wordpress
91584 twitter-blackbird-pie
---
The 'mailchimp' is a recently installed plugin which has already created a high number of apache conenctions.
---
# stat mailchimp
File: `mailchimp'
Size: 4096 Blocks: 8 IO Block: 4096 directory
Device: bbh/187d Inode: 11994057 Links: 5
Access: 2012-04-23 00:09:45.533873264 -0400
Modify: 2012-04-23 00:09:52.778590301 -0400
Change: 2012-04-23 00:09:52.778590301 -0400
---
Full plugin list (most of which are pretty essential to site functionality):
Akismet
All in One SEO Pack
Ambrosite Next/Previous Post Link Plus
Meta Box (custom - uses Alchemy)
Blackbird Pie
CloudFlare
Get The Image
Google XML Sitemaps
Jetpack by WordPress.com
Links in Captions
Load Scripts (custom - for enqueuing Javascript & CSS files)
Login LockDown
Mailchimp
Shadowbox JS
SlideDeck
VaultPress
WP Super Cache
WP to Twitter