Popular Applications Which Consume Your Host System Resources

By Author: Ivan Cuxeva
Total Articles: 782
Comment this article

Today we're going to talk about applications which are very common and that webmasters would use frequently but that often end up putting a lot of strain on your web server making things run a lot slower. Applications which consume system resources appear to run quite nicely when they are not heavily used, in other words, if only one visitor (the webmaster) visits the site there will be no problem whatsoever, on the other hand, if more visitors start coming in (100 to 1000+) the application will start to create queries more frequently which will make the database server crash, which is the worst-case scenario.

Applications which have not been optimized to handle a lot of visitors can access your MySQL database too often in order to read and write information to and from it, this may sound like something very normal, and it is but, they are not handling the information in an efficient way, when this happens these applications may create overheads on your database tables which will make your site to become slower and in some cases non-responsive. Let's mention a couple of very common scripts that webmasters use in order ...
... to create and advertise their campaigns.

WordPress:

If you have been a blogger or the webmaster for more than a couple months then you will find this name to be quite familiar, as most of us know, Wordpress is a blogging script which is very easy to install, configure and use however, there is a darker side to all the beautiful things people have said about this script, if you are a system administrator or a savvy webmaster then it is common for you to access your website statistics and system information, this being the case, you might have noticed that Wordpress uses a lot of system resources in order to work, some people refer to this problem as "a system resource hog" -- in order to address this issue web developers have created caching scripts which lowered the load in the SQL database. Without using any scripts you may notice that for every page view WordPress creates several database queries will be executed, which is not good if you are planning to have thousands upon thousands of page views or if you're planning to run several blogs on the same machine.

PHP Ads-new which is now called OpenX:

This is a very popular ad server is in charge of rotating different banners and links related to the offers that you are trying to promote, the concept of this script is easy to understand, if you have several websites it would be a huge waste of time to try to manually change all of the banners on each of those sites when you decide to run a different offer, a more efficient way would be to have a centralized script which manages all of your banners, OpenX is the script which has been designed to do just that however if you have a website which gets a lot of page views then you might want to contact a programmer who will be able to optimize the script so that it won't crash your database by creating too many queries or table overheads.