I am using Joomla for the content management, and it looks like my site is getting slow, no, not just slow, it’s SLOW. Quick check in the MySQL database showed that there is no really big tables which could cause some delays if not indexed properly or getting locked. So, next step would be naturally looking into the PHP code itself trying to identify bottlenecks. First of all – copy everything to test site – I don’t really want to shut the site down or display some debug info to the visitors. My test site is actually a linux box which is pretty old one, so it probably will run...

The biggest traffic source for the web site is search engines traffic. There is a lot what can be written on search engine optimization (SEO). But I just realized that often web masters or web site owners missing quite important application from the Google itself Google Webmaster Tools That’s a valuable data on what Google “knows” about your web site, definetely worth checking and should be a starting point of the search engines optimization.

We are using FogBugz application for the bugs and support requests tracking. And it’s configured to receive support@companyname.com emails (means tons of spam). Once the database size hit approximately 20,000 requests, we started really wonder: why so slow? It looks like there was another table BugEvent which size is around 200,000 records at that time. It could be some other application, could be your own code. Doesn’t matter – just it happens, one database size grows, performance of the application is degrading. First step to troubleshoot – enable slow queries log in the MySQL...