I have been dealing with some sluggish blogs for a while now.  Seems like it has been getting worse and worse every day.

PowWeb is my host for all of my sites and I really love their service, but recently my blogs have gotten several 500 series error messages, especially on my PiczarPhoto.com website.  I talked with their support people and, well I haven’t been too impressed.

Their servers for regular data are blazingly fast and the features are amazing, especially the database and entire site nightly backups.  Incredible.

Plus unlimited bandwidth and storage and MySQL servers.

Sadly, the MySQL server I’m on seems to be on the fritz.  I went ot Pingdom.com to figure out just how slow the site was and did some research on how I could fix some things on my end., even if PowWeb couldn’t or wouldn’t fix things on theirs.

This is what the speed of my site was like when I first tested it.

It’s Just Justin

Piczar Photo

Anyone find it interesting that both sites take 18.7 seconds to load?  Crazy huh?

Well, then I ran the most awesome WP-DBManager plugin on both sites.  This plugin will allow you to easily backup/restore/delete/repair/optimize your site’s database.

I especially like the repair and optimize options.  I had never really noticed a difference but decided that I’d run both of these and then do the same test through Pingdom.  Check out the results.

It’s Just Justin

Piczar Photo

What did that addup to?

It’s Just Justin was 40% faster

Piczar Photo was 52% faster

That’s a huge improvement.  The MySQL server is still too slow, 11 freaking seconds?  Bullshit. However, a 40-50% increase in speed is always welcomed.  Next I will try a few WordPress Cache plugins, though I think WordPress already had a caching system built in.

Hope this helps someone else out!  So go out and download Lester Chan’s awesome plugin WP-DBManager and any of his other awesome plugins.  I also use his Blog Poll plugin, awesome.