List your MySQL Tables According to Size or Row Count

February 22, 2013 By Leave a Comment

If you’ve ever been debugging a large Multisite installation that’s having MySQL memory issues you know how maddening it can be. Sometimes you can turn on slow logging and find the source of the issue. But sometimes it’s not just about slow queries, it’s about the shear size of the tables and the number of queries being run against them. One trick is to generate a list of all the tables on the site and sort them by size. This will help you narrow down trouble spots. 

USE INFORMATION_SCHEMA; 
SELECT table_name,table_rows,data_length FROM TABLES where table_schema = 'DBNAME' AND table_rows > 0 ORDER BY data_length DESC LIMIT 0,50;

This will produce a list like the following (see below). You can adjust the sort order and limit based on your needs. This query isn’t all that helpful in cases of small installs. But in an installation with 500+ tables it can help you narrow down the issue quickly. WARNING: this query can take a long time to run depending on the number of databases on your server and the number of tables in the Dbs.

table_name	table_rows	data_length
wp_options	125	65536
wp_blogs	1	16384
wp_sitemeta	25	16384
wp_site	1	16384
wp_posts	3	16384
wp_postmeta	1	16384
wp_users	2	16384
wp_comments	1	16384
wp_usermeta	31	16384
wp_links	7	560
wp_term_relationships	8	168
wp_term_taxonomy	2	84
wp_terms	2	72
Filed Under: Wordpress Tagged With: , ,

Regex to Match Opening Slash

December 24, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Just in case anyone needs a regex that tells you that a string does NOT have an slash at the beginning, here you go. This is useful for handling paths defined by users and you want to check whether it is a relative or absolute path. 

  preg_match("#^(?!\/).*#", $string);
Filed Under: Development, PHP

Giving WooCommerce a Try

December 11, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Just a quick announcement. I’m now using WooCommerce for my eCommerce so please let me know if you have an issue. I was using Cart66 but it makes use of sessions, which are disallowed by WPEngine for both security and performance reasons. my WooCommerce setup looks ugly at the moment because I haven’t had time to work on the styles yet, so bear with me.

Filed Under: News

Simplr Registration Form Plus v2.1.9

October 8, 2012 By 111 Comments

Simplr Registration Form Plus

I just pushed Simplr Registration Form Plus 2.1.9 … lots of behind the scenes updates and code fixes. Primary visual enhance is the UI for the TinyMCE shortcode button. You know longer have to type in the custom fields. You can know just check the boxes then drag and drop to reorder.

 

Filed Under: Plugins, Wordpress

Function: get_template_part_cached()

August 25, 2012 By Leave a Comment

In my WordCamp Chicago presentation I had an bunk version of this function. Here’s a better version. Though we could probably still improve even this:

function get_template_part_cached($slug, $name, $key, $group = 'posts', $ttl = 3600) {
	if( !$output = wp_cache_get($key, $group)) {
		ob_start();
			get_template_part($slug,$name);
		$output = ob_get_contents();
		ob_end_clean();
		wp_cache_set( $key, $output, $group, $ttl );
	}
	echo $output;
}
Filed Under: Caching

Slide Deck From WordCamp Chicago

August 25, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Thanks everyone for coming to my presentation at WordCamp Chicago. The organizers did a great job putting everything together. Here’s my slide deck.

WordCamp Chicago Slides

Filed Under: Wordpress

Thesis Cache(r) Beta – 2012-07-31

July 31, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Through my work at WPEngine I’ve found that using the Thesis Theme can occasionally lead to some performance issues on higher-traffic sites. Nothing spectacular, there are a ton of themes out there that have some issues scaling. Thesis is not special.

But what occurred to me about Thesis, is that it really should be one of the more performant themes out there.  The logic of the theme is organized hierarchically. Thesis passes all html output through thesis_html_framework() which means it is very easy to grab it and cache it, thus adding an additional layer of caching using the WordPress Object Cache.

Download it!

Why would you need this if you are already using W3TC or using a hosting company like WPEngine. Both give you various tools for page caching … why use another?

Well, first this plugin is not about replacing your existing caching, but instead making sure that you have adequate caching at the theme level. Even with system level caching there are going to be times where the cache is not served … either because a user is logged in, or because you are getting a lot of traffic and the cache is just missing, or because the cache was purposefully cleared.

ThesisCache(r) just gives you another layer to prevent consuming MySQL/PHP memory if you don’t have too. It gives you page-by-page,post-by-post control over whether to cache a post (or any post type). You can choose to NOT cache a page … or you can even choose to NOT cache the sidebars even though you want to cache the rest.

If you are not currently using ANY object caching no worries, ThesisCache(r) will set up a file-based object cache for you. If you are using an object cache, it will simply leverage what already use.

ThesisCache(r) isn’t in the Plugin Repo yet so here’s the download link. Please report any issues you have in the comments below. I’ll try to deal with them when I can.

Download it!
Filed Under: Caching, Plugins, Wordpress

A Wee Bit of Downtime

July 26, 2012 By 1 Comment

Sorry folks, we had a wee bit of down last night due t0 my own stupidity but now we’re back up and running. Back to working too much and blogging to little. As most of you know I’ve taken a position at WPEngine and they’re working me like mad, but I’m learning all sorts of new cool crap to bring to my projects so … woo hoo!

Filed Under: Life

Hiking in Annadel State Park

June 5, 2012 By Leave a Comment

(more…)

Filed Under: Life Tagged With: , ,

WordPress Hack: Reorder the Admin Menu

April 5, 2012 By Leave a Comment

For many small business clients pages wind up being the most important WordPress post type. Many of them don’t even want a blog, just a nice looking site where they can update the content periodically, i.e. the contact page, the services page etc.

So for these clients it’s often a little confusing to have “Posts” at the top of the nav menu. Here’s how you would reorder to the nav to put pages on top.

First turn on the custom ordering option: 

add_filter('custom_menu_order','__return_true');

Then create a function to filter the menu order array. In the function below we’re using array_splice to cut out the menu starting at position 2 because the “posts” menu item is #3 by default. How did I know that? Just add print_r($menu) and you’ll get a dump of the menu order. After splicing the array, we iterate over the old menu array, the part we extracted ($old), using a foreach loop adding the old menu items back in. 

function mc_menu_order($menu) {
// more on array_splice here: http://php.net/manual/en/function.array-splice.php
	$old = array_splice($menu,2,count($menu),array('2'=>'edit.php?post_type=page'));
	$keys = array_flip($menu);
	foreach($old as $item) {
		if(!array_key_exists($item,$keys)) {
			$menu[] = $item;
		}
	}
	unset($old);
	unset($keys);
	return $menu;
}

Then just add the api call to insert that function: 

add_filter('menu_order','mc_menu_order');

Here it is all together:

//menu reorder
add_filter('custom_menu_order','__return_true');
add_filter('menu_order','mc_menu_order');
function mc_menu_order($menu) {
	$old = array_splice($menu,2,count($menu),array('2'=>'edit.php?post_type=page'));
	$keys = array_flip($menu);
	foreach($old as $item) {
		if(!array_key_exists($item,$keys)) {
			$menu[] = $item;
		}
	}
	unset($old);
	unset($keys);
	return $menu;
}
Filed Under: How To, Wordpress Tagged With: , , , ,
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