In the last couple of weeks commenting on this site was taking longer and longer – sometimes timing out and not letting people comment at all. I was puzzled as to the cause of this and tried turning off various of the plugins I had installed on this blog.
Today though I think I have found what the problem was! I looked into the Akismet anti-spam plugin and found that there were nearly 10,000 spam comments there! I deleted the nuisance comments and now commenting seems to be working much better.
Anyone still having problems commenting here?
Test!
Still pretty slow here Tom, 5 seconds or so I’d guess. Firefox 2 on Windows XP. As I mentioned to you by email, this is invariably a pingback problem, but another possibility is multiple layers of spam/block protection.
Hmmm, that one went through faster now. Odd.
Had noticed that in particular about your site. Hope it was the akisment storage though, handy to know for future reference.
Back up at several hundred spams already – the spammers seem to be busy tonight! Thank God for Akismet – I’ll just have to be more diligent about emptying it in future.
Shared database server could do with some more memory, I think. That sort of table size shouldn’t be big enough to drag a site.
Put another way – what happens when you actually have 10,000 comments?
Create a cron job to simulate the Delete All button once a day. You can probably just run a query on the database, but you might want to look at the source code of the publin first, just in case.
My own blog has suffered from similar issues in the past and it’s on one of my personal servers with plenty of memory and very little else…
A lot of the plugins and anti-spam measures can slow down comments etc, considerably, as each and every request not only involves several SQL queries but a number of DNS lookups and other processes.
Hey,
I have the same problem and I found your post on google. It’s almost 2 years since this was posted but did you find a solution? Thanks
That is hard to believe that the Askimet folder was the only culprit is slowing down your commenting system. Though I like how well Askimet works at getting out most of the spam I do also get frustrated with how it makes my blog seem to operate.