New Years Site Cleaning

Over the end of December and beginning of January 2014, Pulpconnection has been getting hit hard. Not sure how or why but server resource allocation skyrocketed and stayed there for long periods of time. Because of this, Pulpconnection would be unavailable for periods of time. Even after server reboots, resources would be consumed once again in a matter of minutes.

I wasn’t exactly sure how to approach this problem but followed several helpful guides from Dreamhost. I reviewed their WordPress optimization tips but had most of these already implemented. I did some of the WordPress fine tuning suggestions. Lastly, I looked at server troubleshooting and optimization. From what I could tell, there was a ton of traffic from other countries. While I love my international audience, I figured most of my content isn’t necessarily world renowned so I blocked entire countries. Yep, using CloudFlare, blocking entire countries is pretty easy.

Along with this mass blocking, I cleaned out unused WordPress themes and plugins, trying to minimize my WordPress footprint. I also tripled the memory allocation to my servers which made things dreamy but too costly.

The server load has been consistent and steady for the past few days so I’m hoping things are stable once again. But having said this, I bet I just jinxed myself. 🙁