Drat! I love the functionality of aLinks. But today, the admin panel of my blog was running so slowly, I had to break down and communicate with Dreamhost about the slowness. After some discussion with them and some fiddling at my blogs, I concluded that aLinks plugin is a hog. (Needless to say, I breathed a sigh of relief to learn the problem was not one of my plugins!)
Evidently, aLinks not a cpu hog (that’s processing) it’s a memory hog. Or at least Dreamhost tells me my problem is memory.
The memory use issue is quite bizarre because the piggish behavior only happens when you are in the admin panel- that is when you write posts, publish, turn plugins on and off etc. It does not happen when the blog loads. (This means my visitors probably noticed nothing.)
When I finally turned off the plugin, my admin panel loaded quickly. The blog always loaded quickly.
I love the functionality of the aLinks. I looked at the calls, and I suspect the program can be salvaged fairly easily by making it do what it does much less frequently. (As in: do whatever it’s doing when the blogger makes changes at aLinks itself or possibly when the blogger publishes a post rather than every time we turn on any random plugin, edit our themes etc. There is no reason aLinks needs to do anything when I make a change to my style sheet! )
Because I love the functionality of the plugin, I’ll be communicating with the plugin developer. Meanwhile, if you are using ALinks, I advise you turn aLinks off. (Sigh. . . I make good money from Amazon using the auto-linking feature of that plugin. )
This is all very strange because I noticed exactly the same thing today, very slow wp-admin, but I’ve used the alinks plugin for some time and it’s never caused a problem before, so what’s up all of a sudden?
I’m going to log back in now and see if things have changed at all, but thanks for bringing it to my attention. I noticed it as soon as I logged in this morning. Strange.
Sorry, feel free to delete this and add it to the one above. Everything seems back to normal now, and I still have alinks running
This can be caused by a number of things but incorrect use of objects is a big killer. Things like sockets be they MySQL or CURL or whatever being left in memory after they are finished with can kill a weak machine. However if you say it makes you plenty of money from amazon then I think this is some code that is going to get my attention. Where can I find it?
Great thoughts. I never realized how my performance varied such a drastic amount when I started aLinks, until I read your blog.
I’ve not installed word press so don’t bank on my being right after jsut reading the code but it looks like it is trying to phone home. It _should_ only try this once every five days but what you have mentioned it sounds like it is failing to store some date in a meaningfull way. It’s calling what looks like a wordpress function update_option where it should store te datetime stamp of th last attempt. If it was me I would comment out line 74 of alinks.php and se if it starts behaving itself.
The line in question says
$alinksNotices = new aLinksNotices(ALINKS_VERSION);
It looks like a nice plugin so I might port it to NucleusCMS if I get a moment to try the new version which was released yesterday.
I’ve just reread the comments of “Maurice (TheCaymanHost)” and I’d now give you even money on my guessing being right.
After reading the documentation for your platforms XML RPC I don’t thing that line 74 (what is it with that number?) of aLinksNotices.php is correct as the object may not return a Boolean.
Furthermore it will keep trying to phone home until it succeeds meaning while in admin area it will fire off an XML RPC request every page load because each one fails it never increments the timer.
I’ll bet you that if you change line 79-81 from
if (empty($currentVersion)) {
return false;
}
to
if (empty($currentVersion)) {
$this->addVersionOptions();
return false;
}
then it will stop messing you about.
I’m guessing that the real problem (other than a lack of a try again later function) is the server is not coping the authors end or you host has closed the ports your XML-RPC wanted to use.
You can probably guess that I am getting ready to port the code starting by reading it all.
OK and Cool. glad I could throw some clues your way sadly it is midnight here and coffee or no it is bed time.
@all,
I posted a fix on http://headzoo.com/alinks (in the comments). As others have pointed out, it was a problem with aLinks trying to phone home, but home not responding.
I moved headzoo.com to a new server a week or so ago, but I forgot about the XMLRPC code that aLinks is trying to communicate with. I’ll be putting that back in place tonight.
The plugin does phone home every week to check if there is a newer version available. And if so, then it notifies you.