joeware - never stop exploring... :)

You may have encountered some perf issues reading the blog today (Sept 14, 2009). This was due to something within my provider POWWEB. I contacted them and they said they would look into it and suddenly it was working as normal again. Of course this provoked questions…

This was the first response I received

Hello,
The main issue here is that you need to limit the amount of posts that you are loading on one page. There are too many posts per page which is really drawing out your load time. I have raised your PHP memory limit and have also resolved a session.save_path issue within your php.ini file but the main issue here is that too many posts loading at one time issue. That can be adjusted from the admin area of your WordPress blog. Let me know once this is done if you still have loading issues and I’ll continue to help where I can.
Thank you,
Gareth B.
Operations, Tech Tier 2

Not having seen any issues in a very very long time with page loads and having the current setting for number of posts for at least a year I responded:

Why did this all of a sudden become an issue in the last day? I have had the same configuration for posts etc for well over a year now with no issues.
thanks, joe

Their response was again less than ideal

Hello,
I cannot remark on what WordPress configurations may do from time to time, as updates often happen quite often within WordPress. I do know that this may not have been seen before now due to perhaps browser caching. Some new browsers do force a new version of the site to be pulled every time you browse to it, which is good because it then shows the most complete and new version of your site.
When I use any of the many website optimization or page testing sites on the net, I get many flags for this site in concern to the amount of data that is pulled and the number of queries on this one very long page. I definitely advise limiting the number of posts that display on one page to avoid further issues with speed.
Thank you,
Gareth B.
Operations, Tech Tier 2

As someone who has been doing operational support in Enterprise class companies for > 10 years, I feel this answer is more accurately represented with “umm we don’t know what is going on” or alternately “we knew what was wrong but we screwed up and we certainly aren’t going to tell you what we did and in the meanwhile, let me ding you on something else that could possibly cover it although we know it isn’t the problem because it is working great now without you making any mods to your wordpress config…”

Oh the mention of the mod to the session.save_path is also a red herring, I never modified the php.ini file and taking a peek at it, it is still the same as the default for the server. And it is identical to the php.ini file I have on another couple of sites I host through POWWEB.

Overall I like POWWEB but I don’t believe I have yet to have had a good experience with their support team. But then I am probably a bit pickier than a lot of people having done support so long myself and generally recognizing BS when I hear it.

    joe