Ok so yesterday I went on a rampage against my webhost blaming them for causing much disruption in the dear little life of this blog of mine. Sent numerous heated emails, always getting a polite and courteous reply back. I was being a total moron with them. But that taxi ride taught me some good lessons… although not applicable in all circumstances…
I’m a total ignorant when it comes to dealing with MySQL, phpMyAdmin and databases in general. But this is how the blog works. Every time I post a new entry, you type in a comment or simply clicking here and there, the robot behind the scenes of the blog will check the information and store it in drawers, in these drawers you have different files each referring to a specific value (does that make sense so far ?)…No ? OK…. erm…. well think of it as a gigantic coke machine (database/MySQL) that retrieves (queries/entries from the blog visitor or myself) your desired selection (the information you’re looking for/data) as you click on various links (enter the selection on the keypad) minus the financial aspect (you putting coins in the slot). The mechanical basket receiving the coke bottle or your Pringles is called phpMyAdmin. In reality, it’s a little more complicated. But the geek in you will know what I’m talking about.
So after checking the disk usage (total amount of information stored in these different files), I finally came to the conclusion that a plugin I had installed a few months back was tracking and storing every little movement the blog readers and I did whilst on my blog, it was also counting, adding, dividing and doing all sorts of statistical calculations for virtually nothing. Thus storing an incredible amount of data. Too much to digest and useless crap that took way too much space in the database. Resulting in your experience being slowed down or even preventing you from accessing the blog all together.
A simple “delete database table” did the trick. I now receive no more desperate emails from my webhost asking to upgrade and we have a faster blog on hand. It will save me a significant amount of money too. If I hadn’t looked at that darn thing, I would of probably spent 2 CDG allowances on server upgrades over the next week. Not too good in such bad economic times I say !
I’m now glad I have a working medium again. Happy I’ll be a little richer too ! I’m also very glad I bored you for another 10 minutes. But I honestly had to share this improvement with you and unload it for my tired brain or risk the permanent failure of my grey cells. In no way am I a genius. But it felt so good to actually overcome such a problem, I really am proud of myself lol. Here we go, ego kicks in… !
Ah, such plugins are so nasty. Pretty much why I prefer doing all myself, so I know exactly what does what. I’m sorry to read about that money issue (I don’t quite understand it, does your web host charge for extra storage/extra bandwidth ? Or do you mean that they upgrade your package contract when you reach the top limit of yours ?)
I have absolutely no idea what you said, but good that it’s now working properly!
And saving money too! lol!
@clem : They wanted me to upgrade MySQL database disk space because it was over the quota.
@SHB : I have no idea either, can’t be arsed to look into the code…