I’ve hacked most of the website’s theme files to minimize database queries, but it didn’t really help.

I want to track down which database is causing the issue, but there is no tool that MediaTemple provides.

Any suggestions?

I’m the author of the WP Latency Tracker plugin. It’s great to see it in use and helping out.

I wrote the plugin for exactly the reasons that you outlined here and touched on:

They generally blame the user and rarely want to entertain the idea that the problem could be on their end.

I speculated like you that the perpetually upcoming (cs) is simply a working(!) version of (gs). Time will tell if (mt) figures it all out and makes their hosting platform live up to the marketing hype.

If you have any suggestions for new features to the plugin, please let me know. I plan on changing the flash charts over to javascript, allow zoom in/out controls, better reporting, exporting, sidebar stats, etc.

The rigidity of the grid actually makes sense. Until a couple months ago I was still on MySQL 4. For years they told me my account couldn’t be upgraded because it was too old. They said I would have to open a new account, manually move everything over, and then close the original account. I waited so long to do it that they eventually came up with a way to upgrade me.

I also find it very curious that clusters 5 and 6 resolve to clusterserver.net (vs. gridserver.net). Cluster Server (cs) is the name of their (long overdue) next-gen shared hosting package that will replace (gs). I wonder if 5 and 6 actually use some of that technology now?

You have a nice weekend too :)

Normally I’d say there shouldn’t be a difference in something like this, but it seems the grid is pretty… ehm… rigidly built, in the sense that I’ve had MySQL version 5.1.26 or something like that, ever since I got them to upgrade me to version 5. So it seems like they can’t easily just deploy updates. So, each grid cluster may be somehow unique, and the older ones are updated on a very slow scale, while the new ones are built from the beginning with newer software and hardware. Makes sense?

Have a nice weekend =)

How were you able to tell I’m on cluster 1?

Right now I’m running a caching plugin. Without it my site would be running horribly slow. The wordpress admin site is painfully slow for me now – almost to the point of being unusable.

I believe that how well a (gs) account runs depends heavily on which cluster you’re on. Some are slow and some are fast, so it’s just a matter of luck, unfortunately.

I’m actually debating on asking to be moved to a new cluster, or possibly even upgrading to (dv).

I had a gridcontainer a while back, but didn’t notive a big enough speed improvement in order to warrant the price. The waves (latency range) maybe got smaller, but the actual watermark was maybe a bit higher even.

The migration back and forth between smartpool and container was so smooth that I actually got suspicious as to whether the containers are just marketing hype, with more memory allocated to your account, but you’re still essentially on the smartpool;)

All that said, I think these last couple of months has been very stable and speedy enough.

Here’s a screenshot from the WP latency tracker.

These extra (slow) queries seem to come from nowhere. That why I called them, “phantom”.

“The built-in query analyzer was logging hundreds of thousands of (phantom) slow queries”

??

Where they not real, slow queries (hence phantom) or were you just unable to find out where they were originating from?