Battleangel | Personal

At least in my neck of the woods. As I pointed out before, this site is something of a hog on resources, especially database usage. The hosting company wanted to level out the load between servers … so I’m still on the same host, just another server with other nameservers.

One good thing did come out of all this … I have come to terms with the fact that I probably need to improve database efficiency in the future. The situation is barely holding as it is with only 25 – 40,000 users a month. Even if those visitors are just casual and don’t really browse around much.

The first thing I did was essentially to weed out a few Nucleus plugins, among other things the NP_Related which caches Google links related to each item in a huge table and also searches the item table for related local items. That must have been quite a hog on resources.

I suspect that most of the extra database access is generated by the Video Database and Coppermine links here in the right side pane. I could cache both of them and save them to disk just as I did with the Video Database graphic itself. I also suspect that other Nucleus plugins like for instance Referrer (statistics) could be a potential problem.