Anthony Jude Lawrence Gets The Stumble Effect & How to Digg/Stumble Proof Your Site Version 2.0

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This blog is currently about 3 and a half weeks old. I usually get in the region of several hundred uniques a day. However, yesterday, I got around 4000 uniques and 15,000 hits in the space of 4 hours. Yep, almost one every second. (oh btw, for those of you that have yet to subscribe to my FULL FEED RSS, please do so now, and also add your blog for free to the Million Blog Page so that you can get free traffic to your site!)

Most of the hits were from Stumbleupon because the Digg submission seemed to have died off after awhile.

So let it never be said that Stumble can’t command the same amount of traffic that Digg can.

Naturally, being on a shared host did not help. My CPU usage spiked and because of it, my site was taken offline. (I wonder what would have happened if I had been on a dedicated server… how long would the stat counter kept going?….)

As you can see in the Mint Stats above, I usually get in the region of about 600-700 uniques daily (which isn’t bad at all for a 3 and a half week old blog).. and yesterday there was a huge spike, and then 20 minutes into today (its now 12:21am here.. I have gotten 17uniques already.

My feedburner subscription is up by a whole leap as well, courtesy of Stumble/Digg (but I will have to offer more and more linkbaits to the services so that it the number of people that add me to their feedreaders offsets the number that remove me).

Anyway, as I was saying, my hosting provider took me offline because I was causing a huge surge in their CPU usage (understandable because of the traffic) and I had to go and try to remedy the situation as best I knew how.

Once the traffic abated a little bit, I was able to go in and modify it so that it will now withstand the traffic better.

Here is what I did. (We’ll start with the easy stuff first)

1. Database table Optimization - I went into my Cpanel, and then clicked on phpMyAdmin and went to the wordpress database. I clicked the option at the bottom which said "choose all" and then clicked "optimize tables". It then proceeded to automatically optimize all my wordpress tables. Doing this apparently reduces the load on your CPU usage. This tip I found out from Weblogtoolscollection on how he documented the drop in CPU spikes using this method over time.(see image below)… it makes a HUGE difference.

2. Deactivate unused wordpress plugins - this should speak for itself and yes all of you know it, but a lot of you say that you will do it some other day, and before you realise it, its built up into this huge junk plugin system.

3.WP-Cache WITH COMPRESSION - Awhile back I talked to you guys about plugins that all wordpress installations should have in my Part One: General Blogging Tips for Making Money Blogging , one of them being WP-Cache. What this plugin does is that it takes a snapshot of a page and serves up that cache’s snapshot of the page instead of repeatedly querying the MySQL database for information everytime someone requests it. The problem is that it did not work with compression (i.e. you have to turn off the Gzip compression which is supported by Wordpress to use it). So I went looking for something that would seriously push it to the max. I found out that there were people that have been working on hacks to improve Wp-Cache, and some of them have come up with a solution to get WP-Cache WITH Compression. (check it out, a web address that long and it has PageRank hehe). Someone else even did work on this second person to come up with a modified plugin of it. This second person’s blog page is kinda dead, so I rustled up a download link using Archive.org. The link to this site is here. Note that these plugins may behave erratically with Wordpress 2.3 so I suggest that you read up thoroughly before messing about. However, if you want just a straightforward on how to install a regular WP-Cache, head here instead.

Still though, using an wp-cache and optimizing the database tables resulted in the page load times going from 0.872 to 0.453 (almost twice as fast!)

4. Use W3C Validator and get rid of all errors on the page. A lot of browsers these days are standards compliant. Others, more than some (*sniggers at IE users*). Still, while a page may display completely correctly on screen, it does not mean that the site is free from errors. On the contrary, the HTML parsers within the browsers correct these errors on the fly. TIme is taken to correct them. Therefore, the less errors, the faster they load.

Now we are going to get into more advanced territory……

5. Install APC - Quoting Connectedinternet….

Most Wordpress users are familar with WP-Cache2, but fewer are familiar with APC. WP-Cache2 stores the HTML of a page for a user-defined period, which can cause problems if new comments or posts are made within this period i.e. if the page changes.

APC doesn’t suffer from this problem, as it speeds up loading times by caching compiled WordPress PHP files so that the loading time the next time a page is loaded, is much faster regardless of whether the page has changed.

Getting both caches to work together used to be impossible, but if you follow the steps below then you too can have fast loading pages that benefit from both types of caching, reducing your server straing and potentially saving you cash in the long run. So you need to install it, and after that….

This is the clever bit that Mark Jaquith came up with, which is actually quite simple in the end. To get APC to work with WP-Cache2 make the following changes:

In php.ini in the [apc] section, set ‘apc.filters = wp-cache-config’ to exclude wp-cache-config.php and wp-cache-config-sample.php from being cached by APC

Only after all this should you re-enable WP-Cache.

6. Optimize Apache - For those of you that have root level access… you can maximize performance by configuring apache properly.

7. Post Query Accelerators - WordPress’ post queries always ask for posts with post_date_gmt <= '$now' where $now is set to the current time, to prevent posts in the future from showing up. This means that $now changes with each page load. For high volume MySQL sites, the system administrator might turn on MySQL’s qcache, in order to cache some SQL queries. The problem with $now is that it changes each time, so the query is never exactly the same again, and the cache doesn’t help. This plugin is designed to freeze $now to reflect the time of the most recent post or page. This does the job of preventing future posts from showing up, but doesn’t needlessly change $now on every load. For those of you who want more information on this… head here. For those of your that find this is greek to you, stay away.

So there you have it people. 7 tips and tricks that the average joe can put together without any high flying need for coding this and that. Digg proof your site. Actually, for those of you that have read the page till here, I hope that you stumble/digg this article. Consider it a challenge to take down this site. =) And also head to the Free Million Blog page to add your blog to the blog listing there. Get free traffic for your own site! This is obviously after you subscribe to my Full FEED RSS. =)

Tags: Digg, Post Query Accelerator, Linkbuilding, phpMyAdmin, Make Money Online, Blog, Blogging, Stumbleupon, W3c Validator, PHP, Apache, AnthonyJudeLawrenceDotCom, RSS, Linkbait, WP-Cache, Wordpress, Database, Wordpress Plugins, optimization, APC