How to survive the digg effect

If you have a wordpress blog and have gotten to the front page of digg, you may have seen the following error message:

This is usually caused by a large amount of traffic that is overloading your database (because each page that is loaded requires a query or multiple queries).

A great way to not only improve the speed of your entire blog, but help prevent the above error from occuring is to install a plugin called WP-Cache.

Installing

Installing is pretty easy and straight forward:

1. Upload to your plugins folder, usually
   wp-content/plugins/

   and unzip the file, it will create a

   wp-content/plugins/wp-cache/

   directory.

2. If you have Gzip Compression enabled turn it off (in Options->Reading).
3. Activate the plugin on the plugin screen.
4. Go to “Options” administration menu, select “WP-Cache” from the submenu, the plugin will try to autoconfigure everything. The plugin will try to autoconfigure everything and guide you through the process. In case of failure –normally due to the lack of files’ privilegies– it tell you and give the instructions to solve the problems.
5. A way to make things even faster is to enable gzip compression for wp-cache. It can done by doing the following: (within wp-cache-phase1.php) add the following line: if ( extension_loaded(’zlib’) ) ob_start(’ob_gzhandler’); before this line: foreach ($meta->headers as $header) {

The wp-cache wordpress plugin can be downloaded here