D4D Performance

This year, D4D’s performance as a site hasn’t been that great. I’d noticed a lot of times when pages timed out, or seemed to get lost along the way, but couldn’t find what was causing it, despite looking hard on several occasions.

Last week, I finally found what the problem was – and it wasn’t in something I’d done, which was nice. More importantly, it also wasn’t something that was showing up in code or settings – because it was a plugin that wasn’t doing what it had been told to, for whatever reason.

I’ve got a security plugin on D4D that’s supposed to take automatic backups, to add some safety and recovery to the site. That was set to take a backup every week, and to only store three backups, then overwriting the oldest.

Except that wasn’t what was happening. Somewhere along the line, something had gone wrong, and it turned out that it was taking a full database backup (with a different filename each time, so no over-writing etc.)  every fifteen minutes. Then storing them in a folder that was hidden away in a non-obvious location, with a non-helpful filename.

Even on a server that says it’s got unlimited space, that was taking the piss. It was making the server work extra-hard for no good reason, and causing a whole load of problems.

I finally found it all, and ended up both deleting the old files, as well as killing off the backup task completely. (I’ve written my own automated job now which is working fine, and not causing any problems. The moral of the story? Don’t trust other people’s code.)

Since doing that, I haven’t seen the site crash. I’m hoping that the problems are now fixed, the stability will improve, and that 2016 will be a much better year for D4D™

Fingers crossed.