Poor performance

I’ve been getting a lot of complaints about every page on this blog loading very slowly lately. I’m trying to fix it. I assure you it is not heavy traffic, as that’s dropped off in the past few days (either due to lack of content or the horrible load times).

I’m getting tons of “File does not exist” errors regarding a “404.shtml” in the root directory of this domain. Very bizarre.

Today I altered some mod_security filters, but I’ve since undone those changes, and no improvement in performance. I think what may have broken it is that I was trying to sync my blog with some new software I got. I’d read that perhaps Wordpress was being cautious and a bit overzealous in blocking requests, and so I tweaked the mod_security stuff. No go, the software didn’t work.

Now I’ve got some additional research to do, but I wanted to make it clear that I’m aware of the problem.

UPDATE: Pretty sure I have it under control now. I’m tired and I don’t feel like going into details now, but I’ll make a post later for posterity—as well as anyone Googling for blog speed tweaking.

Please comment if it’s still slow for you. You shouldn’t need to clear your cache or anything, it should just be magically snappy again.

And watch that damn Viking.