Wordpress crashing server - what are the options to fix

[Whitey]

We had a site built a while back by an offshore contractor to migrate an old site to new.

The contractor was provided an .xls table with over 10,000 geo categories, country>city>names which we thought would be loaded into a simple database fed to Wordpress and published as SEO friendly web pages. What we got was 10,000+ posts [ we subsequently found out ] and it appears the server is crashing due to caching issues.

The contractor said that for the site to be rebuilt from scratch with a DB behind it will take 40 hours. Even with this, he cannot guarantee performance. So we are moving on.

We're advised by our regular onshore developers [ who are busy on other projects - and cannot be disturbed ] that we should allow approximately 6-8 hours to investigate, and 2-5 hours to fix it.

Has anyone come across this problem, or got any idea on how easy it will be to fix? Any help would be appreciated.

[King of Bling]

What was returned from your server phpinfo() query?

[Whitey]

What was returned from your server phpinfo() query?

Thanks for the tip. I found the page regarding this here :

Other times, these questions are asked while troubleshooting a problem with a WordPress installation. But don't spend at lot of time searching your site, or your host's site, for the answers—there's a very easy way to get that information.
The easiest way to collect the information is to make use of a PHP function called phpinfo(). The phpinfo() function will query your (or your host's) server and generate a report with a long list of data. [codex.wordpress.org...] .

Since I have zilch technical understanding, I'll be stumped until I have a pro go and examine it I guess. I was kinda hoping someone might be familiar with the setup I've described and what common issue could have come from that.

[not2easy]

Are you using a caching plugin? Some of them are notoriously problematic. I would switch to browser caching unless the server is extremely slow. IF you need to keep the caching plugin, I would see if there are settings to limit what it can cache and for how long - sort of defeats the idea.

[Whitey]

Are you using a caching plugin?

@not3easy - we did, but this was removed a long time ago as it was clashing with the other plugins. But I'm really out of my depth here.

I do need to re iterate, that I'm not technical with WP at all, so would like to approach this more from a management angle.

Do you think the time I quoted for someone to understand someone else's WP setup, investigate and provide a solution and fix is reasonable? How would you go about the task ?

[not2easy]

Without knowing the issues, it could be minutes to days, sorry. Too many things can cause problems and even finding the cause could take any amount of time as mentioned, from minutes to days.

People who do tat kind of thing have a list of information they'll ask for and then be able to estimate. Sorry I am not able to be more helpful.

I have fixed minor issues on my own sites, but have no connections to recommend - others might? A very knowledgeable WP fixer might be found looking at some of the plugin developers. I know that Yoast offers services, but I believe that is primarily SEO type services, not server/sql diagnoses.

It this shared hosting, VPS or? Have you asked the host to look at your server load/CPU usage? I would try there if it were happening to me. Are server software packages up to date? Too many possible causes to guess.

[Whitey]

@not2easy - Our guys have us hosted on a VPS / Amazon Elastic setup - pretty robust stuff overall. They manage a lot of top sites.

The Wordpress installs are isolated on the server, but if one WP site goes down, it drags all the other WP installs with it. Our ecommerce [ non WordPress ] is separated from this. They are 100% confident the issues surrounding it are cache related to the excessive [ if poorly setup ] no of posts. As activity on the web site increases, it stalls and they have to clear the cache each time. That's my limited understanding of it currently.