Lag

Oy...

My site is set up on a VPS: a Virtual Private Server.  It basically looks like it's own separate, private machine with nobody else in the world using it.  It's not, because that's a lot more than I can afford, but nonetheless, it's better than the normal run-of-the-mill shared hosting that I used to use.  I can install software and I can do pretty much whatever I want... within reason.  I like the VPS idea and it's affordable.

Lately, if you've read my blog (or anything else hosted on my VPS), you've probably noticed a considerable lag.  It's been getting progressively worse.

I'm not exactly sure what it is, but I don't believe that it's due to the site being overloaded.  Few people regularly visit anything hosted here.

Last night, the whole thing came to a screeching halt.  It was so bad that I couldn't even log into the server to reboot it.  I put in a help ticket with the host and they were able to get the site back up and running.  But this is ridiculous.

I looked up some information on streamlining memory usage, especially with the database server that this site uses.  I tweaked some configuration settings and hopefully, I won't have the same problem with the ever-slowing-to-a-grinding-halt problem that I've been seeing lately.

If so, I guess I'll have to look into the issue more closely and more carefully.  The main problem is that when the site gets really bad, it has to be rebooted, which nukes all of the information that might tell me who the memory hog really is.   Maybe I can write a script that would regularly log such information to a file I can retrieve later.

But hopefully, it's fixed and you can waste less time waiting for my pages to load.