I noticed Thursday evening, while working on the two mixes, that this site was loading very slowly. I removed some plugins and dynamically generated content to compensate but that only made things tolerable instead of actually peppy.

This morning the page load timed out just trying to get to the WordPress “dashboard,” so I dug in deeper and researched the problem. Restarting Apache (something I should’ve done Thursday night as soon as I noticed the problem) made a night-and-day difference in performance. Based on my research I’ve also tuned Apache’s configuration to better utilize timeout values and keep-alives. As a brute-force measure I’m also restarting Apache every week; that should clear out a lot of cruft and clutter in processes and memory that accumulates and bogs the system down.

A server admin’s work is never done… and that’s just the way I like it. Good for you, eh?