Q&A Friday #85: Why Are The Comments So Slow?

Question: “Here’s a question, John: do you have any plans to address the problems with the comments on RWN? First, we can’t post more than one embedded link without getting a message claiming that “the comment has been held pending approval by the blog owner.” Second, posted comments sometimes take up to twenty minutes to appear… which sort of ruins the flow of conversation. Third, comments sometimes appear two or even three times (and it isn’t always because someone hits refresh — I’ve been careful not to do so).” — CavalierX

Answer: Long story short, I’m caught between a rock and a hard place with my hosting.

What happened was that I got to a point where I was just pulling too much traffic to continue on a shared server. So, I needed to move to a private server.

I could have left my host, but with the all the scripts I have running and the size of the MySQL database RWN & CG runs on, it’s a real pain in the butt to move. In fact, one person I discussed it with said they would have to charge me thousands of dollars to do it. Now, since then, I have gotten someone competent who can handle it for a few hundred bucks, but it’s still not easy to do.

With that in mind, I applied for private hosting with my website host — and they have sort of an odd system. Half of it, just the regular site, I got moved over pretty quickly and it runs great. However, they have a long waiting list to move the MySQL database over and that’s where the problem lies. The comments section, the backend of RWN, and a lot of the scripts have to hit that database and it’s just way too slow. My host keeps promising me it’ll be done soon, but they’re having some sort of equipment issue that is slowing things up.

Once I get moved over (and I regularly pester them about it), I expect the problems to cease and I am hopeful it will be taken care of relatively soon (say in a week or three). Sorry about the inconvenience. I want to get it taken care of as quickly as humanly possible.

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