[Plugin: StatPress Reloaded] Performance Issue

I started using this plugin and really liked the stats. Then I noticed I had a performance issue (15 seconds to serve a page, but sub second to render it). When I disabled [Plugin: StatPress Reloaded] my time to serve went back to sub second.

I’m afraid I am in total agreement with “ed4becky” with regards to performance issues. I used the original StatPress (not StatPress Reloaded) since early 2008 without any problems whatsoever.

When the original author discontinued support for the StatPress plugin, StatPress Reloaded (SP-R) was born. Needlessly I installed SP-R, hoping that it would be a marked improvement over the original.

While SP-R had better reporting features, unfortunately it resulted in massively slowing down my blog (it’s at load times. Even access to my WP Dashboard was crawling at a snail’s pace.

What eventually happened was, my web host provider, Bluehost.com first yanked my site offline without informing me in advance last December.

The tech support whom I chatted with told me that SP-R resulted in a huge MySQL file size (110 MB) which he claimed degraded the shared server my site was hosted.

He allowed me to make amends and empty the SP-R tables and all went well. I continued to use SP-R diligently, making sure that it purged records over 30 days and disabled visits by web crawlers and bots.

Today Bluehost.com suspended my site again, much to my disgust! An irate tech support guy whom I chatted with just copy & pasted my SQL database structure and sent it via the chat box.

I submitted a support ticket asking my site to be reinstated but there was no response. Fortunately many hours later I managed to reason with a different tech support guy and he just bluntly asked me “How are you going to fix it?”. He knew what was wrong but was just testing me if I was clueless.

I told him that I via FTP I had deleted the offending plugin – “StatPress Reloaded”, it should not degrade the shared server and pleaded him to reinstate my site. Luckily for me he relented and my site is up and running again.

It seems that I’ve found this equation: Bluehost.com + StatPress Reloaded = DISASTER!!!

My site generates less than 1,000 visitors a day. So it wasn’t a bandwidth issue nor was it a disk space quota issue. It was not even the size of the MySQL database (which was 40 MB at the time my site was suspended).

The problem is that SP-R chews a lot of CPU cycles and overloads the server with a lot (and I mean a lot) of SQL queries each time my site is viewed.

I have even set up WP-Super Cache and CSS and Javascript compressors to lighten the load on my site.

Needless to say, I signed up with another web host provider and will be migrating my site soon. I can’t afford to have my site down for the third time due to SP-R and I’m sorry to say that I won’t be using this plugin again. (There’s always the AW Stats service on the web host to check my visitor info).

Nevertheless, I’d like to thank the author of StatPress Reloaded for his hard work and diligence in continuing the work of the original programmer.

Therefore if your WP blog is hosted with Bluehost.com I would strongly discourage you from installing StatPress Reloaded.

I’ve run through various performance slowdowns with this plugin in the past that all seem to depend on what host it was installed on and how that host resolves DNS lookups. The culprit (for me, at least) seems to be PHP’s ‘gethostbyaddr’ function. I’ve had to kill the host name lookup in the past for troubleshooting purposes and/or performance issues.

I’d be curious to know if either of these ideas solve the above problems:
a. Find the insert statement in iriStatAppend (line 1721) and replace the call to ‘iriDomain($ipAddress)’ with ”
b. Otherwise, find iriDomain() (line 1359) and insert a “return;” statement into the first line of the function.

If you look up gethostbyaddr on the php site you’ll find a lot of issues with this function.

jbob what’s with the eGift Cards link ?

I remember I saw a mysql optimization code for statpress once lemme see if I can find it.

Edit: http://matt.carter.name/shared/statpress/statpress.html

I also have noticed a slowdown on the site and I highly suspect the statpress plugin. My first search lead me here… I guess it’s time to kill it despite its nice features.