An unexpected letter from the hosting provider is as promising as a letter with IRS logo in your mailbox. This time it was about the resource consumption on a WordPress site that ran several plug-ins – Most commented posts (got to direct the readers where the action is), Subscribe to comments (urges some users to come back to the site when they get a ping in the mail), Wp-ShortStat for statistics and Recently commented for keeping track of fresh content. I even recommended some of the plug-ins here.
Normally the account on DreamHost would consume less than 1% of my CPU seconds, this time we were in the double digits. DreamHost happily obliges with the status reports on CPU minutes, but they become available the next day, so switchingall the plug-ins off and then rutning them on one-by-one becomes a week’s worth of project. Looks like Recently commented plug-in is to blame, since it doesn’t scale quite well for a site where the list of recently commented posts appears each time a page is viewed (with roughly 2-3K pageviews a day).
Hey! I just got one of those e-mails! Thanks for the advice! I’m glad to find another Dreamhoster who knows what’s going on!