Comment on Technical Support by SEO Dave.

WordPress Technical Support Stallion makes no changes to the default WordPress RSS feeds so highly unlikely to be a Stallion problem, the feed widget is pretty much a couple of links to the feeds which WordPress core creates. Would be like me linking to your website, you click the link from here and conclude the link is causing your website to load slowly when it’s something else at fault.

Your feeds are no longer default looking, so not a clue what is wrong. Most times someone reports feed issues it’s a plugin problem, can be as simple as having blank lines at the bottom of a plugin file (poorly written PHP code). PHP doesn’t like blank lines and it can mess up RSS Feeds, though usually viewing source of the home page will show blank lines at the very top, basically the blank lines in the PHP plugin (or theme) files are replicated at the top. Having blank lines at the top of a feed seems to mess them up (no idea why).

The widgets issue is also highly unlikely to be Stallion, sounds like a server or resource problem, if WordPress can’t quickly access the MYSQL database for example it will act the way you describe. There are so many things that can go wrong, I’ve extensively tests Stallion to try to make it as efficient as possible, but I have no control over the plugins you install.

WordPress Autoblog plugins are resource intensive and if you are running a lot of plugins or you have a cheap server/hosting account or poorly configured server they can really slow down. I had to replace two new dedicated servers (one after the other) because I believe they were misconfigured by the server company, basically I was seeing CPU usage WAY above what was normal and the server was grinding to a halt!!!

These were not cheap dedicated servers, the companies best dedicated servers, but they were using a new configuration (think I was the first to use it) and I guess they got it wrong. Had to move to another server company because they couldn’t fix it (they blamed me, but the new servers from another place no problems with the backups from the old servers), so when something goes slow/wrong with awebsite can be something completely out of your control. All you can do is rule out problems starting with WordPress plugins, can also switch themes see if it helps.

The latest stallion zip file can be downloaded again, unzip it and use FTP to upload over your online Stallion folder, this will replace all the files IF something was corrupt (unlikely) this would fix it.

The database and memory usage stats built into Stallion can help with troubleshooting a problem. If you find your WordPress blog is using 500 extra database queries after activating a WordPress plugin you know the plugin is rubbish. A feature I was working on sent memory usage from around 10MBs to 60MBs because of a way I accessed the database, found the code at fault and fixed it. Had I kept the faulty code any WordPress blog running the feature would crash on a regular basis due to fatal errors (running out of memory).

David