Title: Explaining SQL Queries
Last modified: August 19, 2016

---

# Explaining SQL Queries

 *  [evilbeet](https://wordpress.org/support/users/evilbeet/)
 * (@evilbeet)
 * [18 years ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/explaining-sql-queries/)
 * Hi all,
 * My website has been experiencing a lot of down time lately, and my hosting service
   says it’s been overwhelmed with SQL queries. So I took a look at the slow queries
   log.
 * I noticed that a lot of the problems came from loading comments — my comments
   table had nearly 200K rows — so I deleted all comments marked as spam or unapproved,
   and that brought my comment rows down to around 50K, so hopefully that will help.
 * However, there are a few queries in here that I don’t understand at all.
 * For instance, I find many that look like this:
 * SELECT t.*, tt.*, tr.object_id
    FROM wp_terms AS t INNER JOIN wp_term_taxonomy
   AS tt ON tt.term_id = t.term_id INNER JOIN wp_term_relationships AS tr ON tr.
   term_taxonomy_id = tt.term_taxonomy_id WHERE tt.taxonomy IN (‘category’, ‘post_tag’)
   AND tr.object_id IN (10392, 10387, 10383, 10381, 10378, 10375, 10371, 10369, 
   10366, 10364, 10362, 10361) ORDER BY t.name ASC;
 * This looks complicated and is obviously taking a lot of power, but I have NO 
   idea what it’s doing or why that query would be issued. Any thoughts?
 * This one also comes up a lot:
 * SELECT option_value FROM wp_options WHERE option_name = ‘siteurl’;
 * What is this doing and why is it constantly being issued?
 * Lastly, I get some that look like this:
 * SELECT comment_date_gmt FROM wp_comments WHERE comment_author_IP = ‘62.85.45.84’
   OR comment_author_email = ‘BridgeandT@hotmail.com’ ORDER BY comment_date DESC
   LIMIT 1;
 * The IP and email addresses vary, but the structure is the same. I am not issuing
   these queries, and I can’t think of anyone someone could issue such a query from
   my website. Is someone directly querying my database for this info? If so, how
   and why?
 * My website is evilbeetgossip.com
 * Any help would be much appreciated!
 * Thanks!!!

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)

 *  [pinoyca](https://wordpress.org/support/users/pinoyca/)
 * (@pinoyca)
 * [18 years ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/explaining-sql-queries/#post-720531)
 * Query 1. This pulls out the list of ‘terms’ (which are tags and/or categories)
   of the given post IDs. (See `wp_includes/taxonomy.php`)
 * Query 2. This fetches your home url (as set in “Options | General”), called by`
   get_bloginfo('siteurl')` or `get_settings('siteurl')`. Everybody and their mother
   calls this whenever they use absolute URLs. (See `wp-includes/general-template.
   php`)
 * Query 3. WordPress is checking for ‘comment flood’ (see `wp-includes/comments.
   php`) each time someone submits a comment. Blame the frequency to your friendly
   neighbourhood blog spammers.
 * (No I had nothing to do with the wordpress source code!)
 * I hope this helps!
 *  Thread Starter [evilbeet](https://wordpress.org/support/users/evilbeet/)
 * (@evilbeet)
 * [18 years ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/explaining-sql-queries/#post-720532)
 * Hi Pinoy!
 * Thanks so much, that was extremely helpful!
 * I’m trying to do some optimization, so I’m wondering about the get_bloginfo()
   function. It looks like this:
 * function get_bloginfo($show = ”, $filter = ‘raw’) {
 *  switch($show) {
    case ‘url’ : case ‘home’ : // DEPRECATED case ‘siteurl’ : //
   DEPRECATED $output = get_option(‘home’); break; case ‘wpurl’ : $output = get_option(‘
   siteurl’); break;
 * etc….
 * Could I save some SQL queries if I went in and manually edited it to look like
   this:
 * function get_bloginfo($show = ”, $filter = ‘raw’) {
 *  switch($show) {
    case ‘url’ : case ‘home’ : // DEPRECATED case ‘siteurl’ : //
   DEPRECATED $output = ‘[http://mysite.name.com&#8217](http://mysite.name.com&#8217);;
   break; case ‘wpurl’ : $output = ‘[http://mysite.name.com&#8217](http://mysite.name.com&#8217);;
   break;
 * I could not find the get_settings() function you mentioned.
 * Again, thank you so much for your help, it is very much appreciated!!!

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)

The topic ‘Explaining SQL Queries’ is closed to new replies.

 * In: [Fixing WordPress](https://wordpress.org/support/forum/how-to-and-troubleshooting/)
 * 2 replies
 * 2 participants
 * Last reply from: [evilbeet](https://wordpress.org/support/users/evilbeet/)
 * Last activity: [18 years ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/explaining-sql-queries/#post-720532)
 * Status: not resolved

## Topics

### Topics with no replies

### Non-support topics

### Resolved topics

### Unresolved topics

### All topics