Topic on Project:Support desk

Wiki page of 8 months, have recently in the last few days started to run really slow

Nothing has changed in the back-end for months, no new extensions, no configurations, no new setups

The wiki has at least 5000 articles, but the system has randomly only just started to run slow the last few days, and I got notification from my web hosting that my site was using too much resources and they recommended that I upgrade my service, or I need to optimize my wiki... I don't understand what has changed and how this occurred? Does anyone have any guidance on this.

www.beyondangkor.org is where the wiki sits.

Likely it's just the server being slow and not your website's fault... get a $5 Digital Ocean droplet (or Linode or whatever) and you'll never look back!

I'll take a look at what Digital Ocean is..

@Jonathan3 Hi, I don't quite understand what im supposed to do with the droplet as you suggest? Is this supposed to replace my webhosting?

It would do. It's an "unmanaged VPS". The droplet thing is a silly word they use for that because it ties in with "Ocean". The way I understand it is that a virtual private server is actually shared with others but in a different way, and a way that lets you do most of what you could do if you had a dedicated server (root access etc).

Maybe another solution would be to try out a new shared hosting server to see whether it's faster than the current one.

There are lots of pages here and on the internet on how to speed up MediaWiki, so maybe those would help too.

Its weird if it suddenly changed.

• check webserver access log for changes in access patterns. Maybe a bot is loading your website a lot. Maybe it got linked somewhere popular
• if $wgMainCacheType is set to something, make sure whatever you set it to still works
• [advanced] use Profiling to see what is taking resources.

Last of all, although its unlikely, also check to ensure your website hasnt been hacked or anything like that.

Thanks guys, it looked like a few bots were scanning it SemrushBot, MJ12bot and one other

SemrushBot rings a bell. A couple of times when my wiki went down it was the same thing. I added Crawl-delay: 20 to robots.txt and that seems to have helped (I don't know for sure).

Sorry for blaming your host unnecessarily! My wiki was about as slow as yours is now at about 15 seconds when tested on "Pingdom". I'd tried all sorts but the answer was moving server - it went down to well under a second.

haha no worries, it seemed that i was spammed with 3 different bots, I've added the crawl-delay and will monitor and see how it goes.