Ron Strilaeff

Update:

The bluehost phone tech support gave me a idea that I already put in place. The two relatively high volume sites are on separate (single) wp installations with their own databases. The newer sites (allza.info being one of them) is part of a multi-site wp installation, using a third database. However they all share the same MySQL User (configured in cPanel under MySQL databases). BH informed me that there is a 15 connection limit so the theory was that I may have reached that when split across 3 databases and 12 sites (even though the application users will get mapped to the db access user for only milliseconds). So the bluehost tech guy suggested I give each DB a separate MySQL User, so now I have 3 databases, each with a dedicated user (obviously I changed each wp-config.php file to match).

That may have helped because the single sites chowstalker.com and dessertstalker.com are performing better (eventhough I still get the occasion “white screen”), but the multi-site sites have only improved slightly. So, I’m continuing to test and troubleshoot and make allza.info a barebones, no-plugin, default theme, test sub-site and go from there. I know there are wp multisite installations with hundreds or thousands of on-line users and I want mine to work that way. Is that possible on bluehost?

Resolved … site is back!!

I may be the only one who ever sees this post, but in case this happens to you, that plugin (and others I’m sure) is poorly documented and it installs two files (db-config.ini and db.php) directly in the wp-content folder. When I deleted the other code files, db.php went into an infinite loop looking for one of them. So I deleted those two misplaced plugin files using filezilla. Also, when I deleted the plugin files, wp dutifully deactivated the plugin (as far as the database options.option_name = ‘active_plugins’ goes), but obviously the destructor method of the plugin could not get executed. I should have waited or kept retrying to get to my plugin admin page and not just whacked those code files, but the site was effectively broken anyways since that cache plugin made it really, really, … really slow.

The thing that clued me in was the error_log file in my wp site root.

Bluehost livechat could not help and suggested that I restore a backup which would have worked if I had erased all the old files first.

Is there a safe, simple caching program out there?? Good grief.