A smidge under five years ago I created my first blog post as I started preparations for travel to South America. Today I’m preparing to travel to more or less the same destinations…but for sadder reasons.
Two weeks ago my father died. A week ago a police officer knocked on my door to tell me the news that the man I hadn’t seen in twenty three years died in Arica, Chile.
So that’s that… I will travel to South America in a few weeks in order to carry out a funeral and try and piece together my father’s life story. Tonight I booked the flights.
Just a few quick shots from last night. I’d arrived late for the first afternoon thanks to a failed gearbox mount (thanks for that, VW Warrington) but at least did get there thanks to a courtesy car (also thanks, VW Warrington!) that got me here just a couple of hours late…
Anyway, to the pics. I’ll add more later, I’m sure.
Staybridge Suites – economical luxury…
Stuart Robarts (@FACTLiverpool) and Don McAllister (@donmcallister)
I’d started to notice that my site could often be slow to load – other sites on the same server weren’t suffering the same way, so I wanted to document a simple way in which one can identify performance issues on the site. This is one of them.
Well, it took me a while to get back to the issue (babies and a booming business don’t help!) it’s continued to get worse and worse, until a recent change has improved things… but only marginally, as shown by the Pingdom chart below:
Not looking good…
This is dreadful, really – daily average of 4,000ms responses just aren’t acceptable where, two years ago, I was getting 800ms.
So, now the process starts. The recent small improvement came after installing our Spectacu.la Advanced Search Plugin, which runs a regular database optimisation to help keep things nippy, but it was still dreadful.
Is it Pluginitis?
My first suspicion is always that of plugins (and sometimes themes, if they’re complex). In our office we have a term called ‘pluginitis’ which refers to the problem of a site having too many plugins installed, many of which are poorly written. I hate to say it, but when clients call to ask for a plugin to be installed that we’ve never tested we go through it and, 90% of the time, discover serious performance or security flaws that will cause long-term issues.
And this site here is old – I’ve been running a WP install for four and a half years with nothing more than upgrades and, like an old PC that’s been upgraded too many times, that causes issues with old drivers and code. Same can apply to WordPress. So let’s see what we can do to improve things.
First stage is to disable as many plugins as possible so as to isolate the issue. I’m using a division based approach – ie, I’m going to disable half of my plugins to see what happens. If I get full performance back, then the problem lies in that half. I can then reactivate half the plugins and see what happens. If the performance is still good, the problem is in the other half. I think you can see where I’m going here.
I’m also going to go for plugins that aren’t written by us. Not because I’m biased (ok, maybe a little) but because I know all of ours are carefully tested for performance – many are run on major sites such as the Telegraphs blogs site. Speed is of the essence.
I’m also going to skip plugins like Akismet, because anything that’s essentially ‘core’ is usually going to be reasonably performant – at least on a small site like this one.
It’s worth noting that I could easily delve into SQL statements and code efficiency – but that’s only interesting to developers – if you’re simply a WordPress user, performance is interesting but what you can do to find problems is somewhat more limiting.
Plugins being disabled:
Add to feed – a simple plugin, but sometimes simple plugins miss simple tricks.
Headspace2 – I have my suspicions about this plugin as it’s massive. Could be fine, may not be. Only way definite way to know – measure it.
Search Meter – a nice plugin to see what people are searching for, but is it adding load somewhere?
Social Bookmarks – it shouldn’t cause issues, but you can never be sure.
wp-typography – I love what it does for the typography on the site, but it’s also running a lot of javascript.
First results:
I do use YSlow to test the site, but one of the problems is that it’s hard to get a large enough series of data to be statistically relevant. It’s good for seeing the extra load (and why I knew the amount of javascript was an issue) but for longer term analysis it’s flawed.
So, we go back to Pingdom and look at the one day chart. As I type this it’s now an hour since disabling the plugins above – so let’s see what’s happened:
A dramatic improvement!
As you can see, in this afternoon alone there’s been a dramatic improvement – from around 2500ms per visit to 1230ms per visit. In one single step I’ve halved the load time of the page.
What we don’t know so far is whether that’s because the page got smaller to load or whether it’s down to a reduction in database load – but that’s really for another article. What this is all about is trying to document how I’m improving the responsiveness of the site in a way which relatively non-technical folk can follow.
What I’ll do in the next feature is to turn off some more plugins to measure the impact they had. I’ll also be interested to see if the spikeyness of the response times has varied much – are they caused by simple server load, or is there something else at play?
I will then start to switch plugins on again in a structured way in order to measure which was causing the heaviest loads on the site.
There’s enough in the video to convince anybody, but I’ve decided to add my own few thoughts.
As long as the military culture exists that allows this to happen, then the West can never consider themselves superior in any sense, nor can we ever expect peace in the Middle East or the cessation of Islamic terrorism. What happened was murder, pure and simple. The airmen acted as judges, jury and executioners.
Just after the start…
I felt sick. You probably will too. I know that this post won’t reach the eyes of anyone in a significant position of power, but if I show it to you, and you show it to some more people, then we can be a tiny part of what will put pressure on the US military authorities to properly investigate this video and explain fully what happened.
It would appear that, perhaps through a state of heightened tension and military paranoia, that any grouping of individuals in Baghdad could become targets. With nobody taking real care to check what was actually happening the killing of innocents, including two children, was inevitable.
But what really really made me angry was the way the airmen talked like teenagers playing a video-game. They described the scene as ‘nice.’ They were please with their blasting apart of a van that had been trying to help rescue the wounded. Their descriptions of the people they were watching didn’t for one moment suggest they were dealing with people or individuals. People with children, parents, lovers, dreams and ambitions.
There are, I’m sure, a great many in the military who’ll be appalled by this video. Let’s hope they can encourage Thinking amongst those who appear to have detached themselves from any sense of empathy.
Over at Interconnect IT, where I work, we’ve found that demand for our WordPress Training Courses has shot up over the past year or so. And it’s certainly interesting to see where the work comes from.
I’ve been thinking about why there’s such a big dip in the middle of our client base – 90% of our business is groups with over 500 staff or with fewer than three.
The Gap
Small, one man companies tend to involve highly motivated individuals. They understand the important of their skills, and they know that in the tech sector they have to always stay up to date. Large corporates tend to understand this too, and have allocated training budgets to make sure they keep up to date. Government departments are often a little slower with new technology, but they too need to keep efficient or tax payers will kick up a stink.
And WordPress is a very efficient platform for running many informational websites.
But why are medium sized companies not coming to us in nearly such large numbers as micro enterprises and large corporates? Let’s see…
Budgets
I’ve noticed that medium companies often have people who are extremely good at what they do, but I do find that there are often significant skills gaps. I’ve dealt with someone from a school (medium) who didn’t realise that you don’t have to close an application in Windows in order to see another application. Each time she cut and paste she’d open one document, select the text, close the document, then open the receiving application and paste the text there. Productivity, as you can imagine, was pretty poor.
I think a lot comes from budgets – many firms around the 50 people size aren’t always able to make good money. They have to be careful where they spend it – they’re not big enough to have training departments who make sure everyone is up to date, and they’re usually busy.
Culture
Another thing with smaller firms, I believe, is that they’re often started by individuals with a lot of skills – these are flexible folk who can teach themselves and learn quickly from books and the internet. As they grow they try and hire similar people, but eventually there comes a point where a lot of staff are there for the job. They need training because they aren’t going to go to the trouble of autodidactism. They have a job to do, and they’re going to do that and no more or less.
At best, they’ll get on-the-job training.
Our Marketing
We don’t do a lot of it, to be quite frank. But perhaps our website, approach and costs simply don’t ring true with people in medium sized companies looking for WordPress training? Do we need to get advertising in business magazines, such as those sent out by the FSB?
Summary
I suspect that the truth is that a company always needs to look at the skills of staff, but as they reach a certain size they have too much going on to give it much thought. Once they break through that difficult 50 man barrier things seem to start to change again.
But how do we change this? I’m not sure we can, easily. Governments often give generous grants, and around here we have Skillworks which helps a little, and we do get local approaches – however, the person paying still has to pay a significant contribution and specialist training is never all that cheap.
Do you have any ideas of how skills can be improved in small to medium sized enterprises? Should we be marketing our courses more proactively? What about scheduled classroom courses that keep things at a lower cost, albeit needing more time from the attendees? I’d love to hear your thoughts – especially in the field of WordPress.
I noticed on my pingdom stats recently that this site has been slowing down recently. But why? Is it WordPress? Some plugins? Time for research!
I don’t really look at server response times too much, because generally it’s a bit dull, really. If our server is really sick then the automatic alerts and text messages from Pingdom tell me to get fixing.
Anyway, tonight I just thought I’d have a look at some graphs. And hey, there’s a bit of a shock… my own site, this one here, is getting slower. Here’s the graph:
Now, what you’ll notice is that generally everything looked nice and brisk until early August 2009 when there was a marked deterioration in performance. Then it plodded along just fine until December 2009 when it got worse again.
Is It WordPress Bloat?
I wondered what had happened to cause this – I’m especially shocked that a page load is now so slow. I haven’t changed the theme in use for at least a year, and the plugins are generally ones I use elsewhere. So I did a bit of thinking, and then it dawned on me when I found this list of release dates at WordPress.org:
The dates correlate exactly with the worsening performance of this site.
Now, correlation absolutely does not relate to causality. At upgrade time I usually take a moment to review plugins, upgrade the theme, etc. It could be that an upgrade or change to one of the many plugins in use here that has caused the slowdown. I know it’s not traffic to my site – that’s been flat for ages, with only the occasional blip. The server is a dedicated machine running about fourty sites that we manage, but the load is generally quite consistent and impact on different websites is fairly well managed.
But I’m a speed freak. I like it when a website zings into view. I love fast cars. I love computers that don’t dither. I love telephones that respond instantly. So I hate that response times are now below 1s. That’s not on!
So I’m going to try to find the cause of this slowdown – I’ll be running some experiments on this site, profiling queries, checking the database over and so on. And I’ll document it all as a way of showing you how we at Interconnect IT do our performance tuning. Whether I document it here or there I haven’t decided yet – I think it would make a good case study for the site. We’ll see! Watch both sites…
Sean’s 40. But he’ll always be two months younger than me. Dammit. Well, here’s some photos from his party. Enjoy…
OK, it’s taken me four months to actually pull these images from the memory card, get them on my computer, select them, resize them for the web, and upload them.
And mainly because tomorrow I go to see Sean & Em to celebrate the 1st birthday of their young son Matthew.
I’ll try and be quicker next time, but in the meantime, enjoy the pics:
After two years of going nowhere near a race circuit while I concentrated on building up the business, I finally got the Elise nicely fettled by Phoenix Motorsport in Accrington and got out with the Gold Track Driving Club.
After two years of going nowhere near a race circuit while I concentrated on building up the business, I finally got the Elise nicely fettled by Phoenix Motorsport in Accrington and got out with the Gold Track Driving Club.
Loved every minute of it.
My friend Gordon was there with his economy special – a BMW 325 he picked up for a mere £400. A spot of (very light) preparation later and out he went. On snow and ice tyres, because that’s what was fitted.
Below’s a full set of pictures of both cars (unedited and unchanged) taken by the lovely ladies at Fresh Orange Photography.
Over the weekend just gone I made two planned presentations at WordCamp UK 2009 down in Cardiff. I also threw in a quick 45 minutes of show and tell on the Caribou Theme that runs this site and is available for download from Spectacula.
Over the weekend just gone I made two planned presentations at WordCamp UK 2009 down in Cardiff. I also threw in a quick 45 minutes of show and tell on the Caribou Theme that runs this site and is available for download from Spectacula.
I also got to mix with some very interesting, talented and cool people that know a heck of a lot of stuff about what we’re working with. In this conference were, potentially, the next generation of web creators. People who will make things happen. And this year, more than last, there was a real buzz at the potential of WordPress, its markets, and its uses.
Presenting at WordCamps
Presentation
I’ve never actually done a formal presentation in front of more than about ten people before in my life, and even then only perhaps four five in my life. I’m a techie – I would do technical discussions and demos, but never with Powerpoint and a laser pointer. I did do an unconference show and tell at Barcamp Liverpool last year where about twenty to thirty people turned up, but that wasn’t planned… it just kind of happened.
But I could also appreciate the benefits of putting myself out there in front of a room full of my peers. So in a fit of enthusiasm I volunteered for two presentations – WordPress in the Enterprise, and WordPress for News and Media. I expect one or even both might be dropped by the organisers. I have no history or background in public speaking.
Both got accepted.
Damn!
But it had some great potential too. I could play with approaches and actually ‘test’ the results. So what did I learn? Read on:
1. L-Shaped Rooms are Tricky
The main room for the event turned out to be L-shaped… or, a better description, V-shaped, with the presented at the bottom of the V. At this event three rooms were in operation, a large L-shaped room with up to 150 people, a medium sized rectangular room for up to 70 people, and a small boardroom type for about 15 people.
I had expected my first presentation on the Enterprise to be the tricky one – it’s not a fascinating subject. But it was in the medium sized room, and it proved very easy to get engagement with the audience. In the L-shaped room you’re trying to look in two different directions. It’s almost impossible.
2. Consider an Assistant for Demos
One can work the computer, the other can talk. Saves awkward silences, and it’s something I’m going to try in a future talk.
3. Get in Early
I did one of the first, and the very last, formal presentations of the event. I noticed that in the first everyone was wide awake and very enthusiastic. By the end of the conference people were flagging. Getting and keeping attention becomes trickier at this stage. You also have the advantage that nobody ever wonders off from the conference at the very beginning – it’ll never be fuller!
4. Start Funny
In the Enterprise talk I started with a humorous quote and in the News & Media I started with a pithy quote. The funny one got the mood lifted and people in a cheerful mood. It gave me a chance to relax and settle into the presentation.
5. It’s a Great Audience
I was dealing with fellow geeks. People in the same situation as me. It was, frankly, the best audience I can imagine. The few presentations I’ve done before have been up in front of a board of hardened and cynical directors, or senior management, or people who have tough deadlines to meet. This was a whole lot more relaxed. Nobody’s going to consider firing you because of a minor mistake.
6. Get Engagement
I noticed that speakers who asked for shows of hands, asked questions of the audience and so on generally had a better applause at the end than those who didn’t. It doesn’t take much to engage your audience, but I’ll admit that it’s trickier when you can only look directly at half of them at any one point.
7. Be Prepared
At conferences opportunities come up. Have business cards, listen to people, smile a lot.
8. Freebies
You can’t believe how the mood of a room lifts when you hand out gifts. Good gifts though. I remember the really rubbish calculators we got given in my ICI Systems days. What geek in the world needs a calculator? So I handed out the penknives we had made for Spectacu.la and they went down a treat.
9. Matt
I finally met Matt Mullenweg at the weekend. I’d promised him a beer months ago in reconciliation following our (now seemingly minor) argument over WordPress’s take on the GPL. So I bought him a pear cider and had a good chat. He’s an affable chap, easy going, says ‘awesome’ a lot (but he’s American, so that’s normal) and has clearly listened to the concerns of WP developers about how they’ll make any money.
Funny hat tho’ ;-)
Summary
An ace time, basically. I’d like to say hi to everyone I met, but I’m scared of missing someone – so instead, let’s just say I look forward to chatting and, hopefully, working with some of you in the not so distant future.
