I was going to write a helpful little tale about how I got the lead out of the site. It was pretty darn pokey before. You may have noticed the performance is a bit snappier now. So what was wrong, and how did I fix it?
I noticed that a test WordPress site I had was pretty responsibe, so I figured it had to do with some of the plug-ins I had installed. I strongly suspected that the SimplePie plug-in that I use to aggregate the RSS for the sidebar content was the issue. But even when I disabled almost all of the plug-ins, I still had problems.
So I actually removed all the non-standard plug-ins, and disabled the rest. Suddenly the site was fast. Just to confirm my theory, I put the SimplePie plug-in back, but left it off. Still fast. Turned it on. Still fast.
So the good news is the sidebar aggregation isn’t an issue. It must be one of the other plug-ins:
- Comment Timeout
- FireStats
- IMM-Glossary
- PowerBlogRoll
- Widgetize Anything
One by one, I put them back in, and turned them on. I got down to the last one, Comment Timeout, and thought I had finally found it.
But I put that one back in and turned it on, and things were still fast.
So, honestly, I have no idea why it is better. Must have been some problem with the ducts. But you blow your nose, and it’s fixed.
mrnosuch 
nosuch.org