Day: February 16, 2008

Here is a list of plugins that have caused that server overload or resource abuse yesterday

1. Views Counter. This plugin helps you to easily track how many times your post page was viewed and by what quantity of visitors. I installed this plugin because it served as a “mini-stat counter” for my posts. It also served as a potential gauge for future related posts.

2. No Old Spam Links. This plugin add “nofollow” to all links on any domain on a blacklist, applied in posts and comments. I installed this plugin in thinking that it will help me regain my page rank. My alternative to it is add the “rel=nofollow” attribute to the paid links, manually. Also, I uninstalled the TLA plugin.

3. MaxBlogPress Stripe Ad. It’s a non-obtrusive way of displaying a single line of advertising message, a special note or other information right at the top of your blog. I used it to promote my contest.

Uninstalling these plugins also helped in minimizing server load:

1. Quoter. This plugin lets you quote a particular comment or portion of the blog. Uninstalling it minimized the load of most-commented posts in this blog. This is recommended only to high-trafficked sites receiving a good number of visitor comments.

2. Commentluv. This plugin shows a link to the last post from the commenter’s blog in their comment. It’s one way of attracting comments. It reduced significant number of queries.

3. Dagon Design Sitemap Generator. This plugin generates a fully customizable sitemap. When this was installed, my post archives performs 75 queries, when uninstalled, it reduced significantly by 60%.

This post does not mean to discourage you from installing these plugins, instead it serves as a warning to avoid site suspension from your host, especially if you are using a shared hosting.