I am scrambling to figure out what the heck has been causing so many problems on my site. And I struck on the bright idea that maybe it is a WordPress plugin called StatTraq which has been slowing us down by submitting too many MySQL queries. I have just disabled it as a test, and load times for my site seem to have increased like crazy.

Could you do me a favor and let me know if things are working more smoothly on your end? Try re-loading the main journal index page and then try clicking around on some individual links. Let me know if anything seems different. It’s a very noticeable change for me.

I talked over email with one of the guys at my prospective hosting company and he suggested that a lot of the WP plugins are poorly designed for database activity and frequently cause these types of problems. Hopefully this will resolve it. Chances are, I’m still going to be switching hosts regardless though - especially as I gear up to launch this new site!

UPDATE!

I went in and killed the database tables used by StatTraq. That sucker had ballooned up to 500 megs saving what amounts to not especially useful information to begin with. Big fat warning to all you other users of StatTraq out there - watch out or that thing will eat you alive with server space, database size and MySQL queries out the yin-yang!