Don’t Let Silly Errors Slow Your Server Down
Written By: admin Posted On: July 18, 2007 Tags:
I decided to clean the server up a little bit tonight, and noticed a few weird things using a lot of resources. One was an error called to a missing image and another a missing favicon.ico file. I guess I missed a couple of things when I was working with the themes and it was having a dramatic impact on CPU usage.
You see, since Wordpress redirects any 404 ‘file missing’ attempts, every time it took a hit it was redirecting the 404 for the missing image in the theme. Apparently it was causing enough stress on the server to be consuming 12% of all CPU resources, and 5% for the missing favicon.
You might also notice that the ShareThis plugin is using a whopping 7% of my CPU resources.
This is just a friendly reminder to make sure all of your theme files (including robots.txt) that are being called are actually where you say they are, or they could be having a bigger effect on your server’s resources than you might expect.
thanks for the heads up, I checked my control panel and saw a nearly identical report sheet, would have never noticed either.
Nice, what program did you use to get those Stats? can I use it on a dedicated Virtual Server?
Tolumi,
As far as I know this is a custom tool from mediatemple. I don’t think that they have a version open to anyone but (mt) customers.
One thing to keep in mind is that it may sound like a lot, but it’s not. What’s your TOTAL GPU usage? Probably well under 100 right? If you are using like 50 GPU’s out of the 1,000 you are allowed to get, and one thing is taking up 15% of that….you are really only taking up .075% of your total allocated resources.
You should still look at and optimize in any way possible though, just like you are doing
A nice little reminder. I gotta figure out where I can find this. Is this info just from your log file?
Hey, what do you know, I’m with media temple
. What tool is it? Do you know if it is avaiable on their dv server?
Hey Dave,
You’re right. The usage is all relative. I still think it’s funny that a missing image in your wordpress theme can use almost as many CPU resources as my Wordpress index. If I were getting one million uniques a day, the missing images should still be using the same % of resources since the redirect is still being called on every hit.
Bush,
It must be pulling something from the raw log, I’m not exactly sure how it works– wish I did, I would share it with you. It’s a handy tool.
Tolumi,
I’m not sure that the VPS servers have this feature since I believe the VPS has Plesk installed and my sites are hosted on the grid shared hosting. It may be worth e-mailing them in reference to the GPU monitoring tool that the grid server has.
It’s kind of hard to call favicon.ico a “missing” image unless your template files are actually linking to it. It is a nasty habit of *way* too many web browsers to automatically look for server.xyz/favicon.ico whether the page being loaded requests it or not. Imagine the bandwidth that could be saved and the error log cruft that could be avoided if Microsoft hadn’t come up with this dumb concept, then Moz and Safari didn’t mimic it. It’s shameful.
I use Alex Kings 404 Plugin. It sends me a mail every time a 404 occurs. You might want to check it up.
Hey Garett,
I agree with you. While it’s good practice for every site to have a favicon.ico, IE shouldn’t call for it every time a page is loaded just in case it isn’t there.
Arpit,
That’s a pretty good idea for a plugin. I try to keep an eye on 404’s through Google’s Webmaster Tools, but I may install the plugin so long as it doesn’t use a lot of resources. Thanks for the tip.
your welcome. the plugin works well but the amount of mail you’ll be getting might be a bit overwhelming if some strange Search bot comes to index your pages. I have create a separate label in Gmail to track the 404 errors mails.