Wordpress blog MySQL data maintainance valueable
plugin WP-OPTIMIZE
The more my blog is growing the slower it becomes, this is a
tendency I've noticed since a couple of weeks.
Very fortunately while reading some random articles online I've
came across a
super valuable wordpress plugin called
WP-OPTIMIZE
I think it's best if I present instead of taking the time to
explain what the WP-optimize does for a wordpress powered
blog:
WP-Optimize is a WordPress 2.9++ database cleanup and
optimization tool. It doesn't require PhpMyAdmin to optimize your
database tables. It allows you to remove post revisions, comments
in the spam queue, un-approved comments within few clicks.
Additionally you can rename any username to another username
too.
For example: If you want to rename default 'admin' username to
'someothername'; just put 'admin' (without quotes) to the Old
username field and the new username to the New username field, then
click "PROCESS")
Now in short to rephrase above text, during MySQL database requests
a lot of database starts needing the so called MySQL optimization ,
this operation becomes necessery especially for databases which are
very actively used and is related to the basic design of the mysql
server.
Very often many tables starts having a lot of garbage (repetitive)
data and therefore read and writes from the SQL server gets slower
and slower day by day.
Thus the MySQL server has it's famous OPTIMIZE TABLE command which
does wipe out all the garbage unnecessery data stored in a tables/s
and hence seriously impacts the later read/write table
operations.
Now to go back to wordpress the same optimization issues, very
often are a cause for a performance bottleneck and some smart guy
has came with the great idea to create a specific wordpress plugin
to fix such an optimize table issues
The WP-Optimize plugin has 5 major options which somehow could have
a positive impact on blog's performance, these are:
- Remove all Post revisions
- Remove all auto draft posts
- Clean marked Spam comments
- lean Unapproved comments
- Optimize database tables
Apart from the nice performance boost applicaiton the wp-optimize
plugin has one super valueable function,
it could change the
default wordpress blog administrator user admin to some
other desired username, for example
rename the default blog
administrator username "admin" user to "john".
From a security perspective this is another must have feature in
every wordpress blog as it can kill many of the possible brute
force attacks with some web brute force softwares like
Hydra
Installing and using
wp-optimize is a real piece of cake,
here is a very quick few command lines to install it:
host:~# cd /var/www/blog/wp-content/plugins/
host:/var/www/blog/wp-content/plugins:# wget
http://pc-freak.net/files/wp-optimize.0.9.2.zip
host:/var/www/blog/wp-content/plugins:# unzip
wp-optimize.0.9.2.zip
...
To launch
WP-OPTIMIZE and fix many speed bottlenecks caused
by unoptimized tables, or just hanging around in database old spam
comments, go and login with your adminsitrator to wordpress.
In the left pane menu starting up with
Dashboard somewhere
near the end of the vertical menu you will notice a button reading
WP-Optimize .
Click over the Wp-Optimize button and a screen like the one in
below's screenshot will appear in your browser screen:
I have personally decided to use just 2 of all the 5 available
primary plugin options, I decided to select only:
- Clean marked Spam comments
- Optimize database tables
Scrolling below the
PROCEED button I could also notice a
number of tables which were missing optimization and hence required
an
optimize table to be executed on each one of them.
Further on I pressed the
PROCESS button and after a couple
of minutes (2, 3 minutes) of waiting the
wp-optimize plugin
was done it's selected tasks:
In the screenshot below, you see all my blog tables which were
optimized by the plugin:
It's interesting to say few words about the
Remove All Posts
revisions plugin option, as many might be wondering what this
plugin option really means.
When writting posts, wordpress has an option to restore to a
certain point of the write out and makes a sort of different
versions in time of each of it's written posts.
Therefore later restoration if something gots deleted by mistake is
facilitated, this is actually the all meaning of
Remove All
Posts revisions
With time and the increase wp posts the amount of
Posts
Revisions is growing on and on and just taking space and
possibly making the access to the database entries slower, thus it
might be a good idea to also remove them as, it's absolutely rare
to use the wp post restoration function.
However I've personally decided to not wipe out the old posts
revisions as someday i might need it and I'm a bit scared that it
might cause me some database issues.
I'll be glad if somebody has tried the
Posts Revisions
wp-Optimize funciton and is happy with the results.