Matthew who installed APC for me has finally cracked (I think) what was causing my site problems over the last two weeks. It looks like over the last two weeks I’ve been under a massive site attack, receiving around 350 spams a minute, that was overloading my server. We think what was happening is that the Math Comment Protection plugin was blocking the spams, which was why I didn’t see the huge numbers in SK2, but was still doing a lot of mysql processing.

We’ve switched to just using SK2 by itself and all seems well so far, although the spammers seem to have moved on now. Matthew also made some other tweaks which seem to have helped. My load average is back under 1, and finally my CPU is showing idle resources again - 70-80% whereas before it was showing 0-10% if I was lucky.

An earlier comment asked me to explain how I backed up and reinstalled Wordpress. This is how I did restored Wordpress when my site died totally:

1. Backed up my Wordpress mysql database following the method on the Wordpress Codex. I made 2 copies just in case one got corrupted or something
2. Then I FTPd into my server and downloaded my whole wordpress directory - again 2 copies
3. Then I removed my complete Wordpress installation by deleting all files and also the mysql database
4. Downloaded a fresh copy of Wordpress and installed it on the server
5. Looked at my backup Wordpress files and worked out which ones weren’t part of the standard build e.g. my theme, and which files I’d changed manually in the standard build. Once I’d done this I uploaded these files to the server.
6. I then turned on the plugins I wanted
7. I then looked at what tables had been created by the standard build and also by the plugins that I’d turned on, and imported the corresponding tables from my backed up database
8. I then manually imported any other tables I thought I needed. I didn’t import the full database as there were 42 tables in all, some of had been created over time by plugins I had tried in the past. I worked out I only needed 22 tables in all.
9. I think by doing step 8 I’ve made my database a lot leaner by removing tables that weren’t in use anymore. I even went one step further and deleted fields in the 22 tables I’d kept such as ‘autometa’ and ‘description’ as my theme now automatically adds meta tags
10. I then ‘repaired’ the tables to make sure I hadn’t created any probs, and then ‘optimized’ them

It’s a shame my site has been performing badly over the last 2 weeks, as judging by the number of hits I was getting in the few periods when everything was ok, I was looking at a few record weeks. At least now I’m confident the site is fit and ready to go for the new year.

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