Speeding up this website

A few months ago, I started to migrate some of my websites to DigitalOcean because the cost of a virtual server is $5/mo. So, I moved CodingGorilla.com to the new host. (Note, a long story, but the name came from an old boss, who saw I have the patience of a saint and attention to minute details, the traits of any good programmer.)

Unfortunately, the website has been painfully slow because I was told that you should keep your database and web server on separate hardware. This may be fine for large corps which have their servers on a fast LAN, but this was the wrong advice for a blog. I moved the MySQL database to the web server, and now the website works ~100x faster. Adage for the day: Believe half of what you see and nothing of what you hear.

Incidentally, the tool which I used to find this problem is Query Monitor by John Blackbourn (plugin page, website). I flags the slow queries, places the runtime for each query in a table, which you can then copy and paste into Excel to compute the total time required for the queries.

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