Yet again some piece of rogue code has been causing WordPress to misbehave badly enough to practically cripple the server. I don’t know any more details than that really, just that I need to fix it.

So I have stripped WordPress of everything that I can. The core software is the latest version – only a few weeks old – and I am on the default theme with the barest minimum of customisation (just some text in the footer and the Statcounter code in the sidebar).

All the plugins I was using are disabled except for Akismet (which everyone has – I can’t believe that is the problem), Spam Karma (which I didn’t have when this site first started playing up) and the WYSIWYG thing for writing posts. That only gets called when I write a post, so couldn’t cause widespread trouble anyway, and I would rather give up completely than have to manually moderate the 1000+ spam comments that arrive every day.

I am working on a strong suspicion that the ‘Get Recent Comments’ plugin was the culprit. Its effects can be mitigated by using caching, which is not a bad thing to have anyway, so in a belt & braces approach I have added caching, downloaded a new, better-behaved version of the plugin and then disabled it anyway.

If everything looks OK now I shall start adding bits back to see if they impact on the server’s load.

If the suspicions are right, its bloody annoying as the recent comments facility is one of the little extras which is actually useful and not just eye-candy. With any luck the latest version will work without any side effects and the new caching will speed everything else up anyway.

All I need now is a bit of traffic so I can see what the damage is, but if any of my more technically-inclined visitors have any thoughts on this I am all ears.