All my recent Compact Calendar posts seem to have caught the attention of the all-knowing folks at LifeHacker, and I was actually knocked offline. More accurately, my site was taken offline by FutureQuest, who caught the server load spiraling out of control due to PHP issues, and they took measures to keep it everyone from crashing (it’s a shared server). Though this was an inconvenience to me, I’m impressed that they caught it and contacted me (via email) so quickly.

After I got back into my site, I made a few changes:

• Made a static copy of the page
• Used .htaccess Redirect to direct the dynamic URL to the static page.
• Nuked the big images and FAlbum.
• Disabled GZIP compression (I have it hacked into WP-Cache)
• Moved files to a second server with (hopefully) enough bandwidth.

So far so good. I would have thought that WP-Cache would have reduced the server load, but I’m thinking now that it was the GZIP compression that was killing the server, because the hack I applied doesn’t modified WP-Cache to store the GZIP’d information. It applies GZIP on the fly, which can’t be good.