Troubleshooting -UPDATED

Byjonathan
Graph showing blog downtime for last 30 days.
Blog downtime for the last 30 days, according to pingdom.com

Please excuse this bare-bones look. I am reverting to the WordPress default theme for my blog while I do some troubleshooting.

I am getting reports that my blog is experiencing performance problems lately and I am trying to determine if the problem is with my web hosting service, ixwebhosting.com, or Suffusion, the WordPress theme I have been using, or something else.

Readers can help me by reporting their experience with accessing this site. Do you get error messages? Does it take a long time for the blog to load in your browser?

I’d also appreciate knowing if readers liked the previous format and look of resistance is fruitful:

Screenshot of my blog using the theme Suffusion

Update 02/06/2011: The default WordPress scene, did indeed speed up response times. Unfortunately, it just doesn’t have the flexibility I want. So I am restoring the Suffusion theme that I’ve come to love so much. I will continue to tweak some of the extra features and plug-ins, to hopefully improve the response time.

Thanks to those who responded in comments and privately.

Wait... there's more!

  • 97

    97. That’s my latest CD4+ count, less than half the count from six weeks ago.

    That’s it. I have tried as many alternative treatments as I can think of to reverse the decline. I will be starting my third round of pharmaceutical ARVs as soon as I can get a prescription and fill it.

    This decision has been a long time coming, and in hindsight, I probably should have restarted a few months ago. There’s nothing magical about 97, or being below 100, but it’s as good a breaking point as any. I’ve long argued that there are two things to keep in mind about CD4 counts: one is the long-term trend; the other is single- or low double-digit counts.

  • Reduce AIDS drug toxicity and side effects

    I embarked on my third course of ARVs since 1998. For ten of the sixteen years I have been HIV-positive, I was able to manage well enough without ARVs and I continue to believe there is no reason for otherwise healthy HIV-positive—let alone negative—gay men to take these drugs. To those who want to wave a recent study about the benefits of early intervention in my face, I would ask them why they put so much faith in a science that has utterly failed us to date.

  • The truth about Truvada: PrEP won’t stop AIDS

    I’m willing to grant that gay men are entitled to use PrEP… provided they have access to all the information they need to make an informed decision. Informed consent has been a hallmark of the HIV and AIDS research and prevention efforts for three decades, and that shouldn’t be waived for the campaign favoring PrEP.

    Gay men deserve to know that all the claims for Truvada reducing the risk of acquiring HIV-positivity  are based on trials—funded by Gilead—that emphasized the importance of using condoms…

  • Confessions of a heretic AIDS dissident

    You might not know it from reading the comments left here on my blog, but there are more than a few AIDS dissidents who really don’t like how I think or what I write about.

    There’s a whole thread on a very popular Facebook page called “Rethinking AIDS”, discussing my open letter to Dora. Last I looked, that thread had nearly 100 comments, and very few of those comments were about Dora, Ruggiero or the defense of academic freedom.

    No, the gist of the thread was whether or not I am in “the AIDS Zone.” It seems that because I did not use “air quotes” around the term “HIV disease”, I’m not really an AIDS dissident. Others took issue with my post for daring to publish that some AIDS Rethinkers hold a very narrow view about “HIV” and “AIDS”, while others of us are merely “questioning” the whole affair. None of them chose to comment directly to me here.

    Some of the most visible and vocal Rethinkers seem intent on imposing their own “beliefs” (another loaded term that deserves quotes) on the entire movement. There has long been a tendency to try to impose a sort of litmus test to determine whether or not one is a true “AIDS dissident”.

    Since I first met the AIDS dissident community via the AIDS Myth Exposed forums—since renamed Questioning AIDS—several years ago, I’ve become aware of several of the various factions, distinctive personalities and divisions within that broad group. Now I’m finding it ironic just how guilty some of these people are at their own version of “bone-pointing”.

5 Comments

  1. I check into your excellent blog frequently and have never found the site to be down or slow to load. Im in NZ, maybe its a local US problem.

    Reply

  2. From this page’s footer: 49 queries, 22MB in 3.118 seconds. The number of queries (49) is quite low. The memory (22MB) is a bit on the higher side, but that isn’t always because of the theme. The response time is definitely high, but again, that has something to do with the fact that I received a popup saying “Secured Area” asking me for a user name and password, which I escaped, and your page loaded immediately after that. Maybe that is what is causing high response times to be reported.

    You can also try some caching plugins like W3 Total Cache to speed things up, if you please.

    Reply

    1. Wow, Sayontan! I’m very impressed that the developer of Suffusion is tracking his work so closely. I’ve been reading the Aquoid Forum for hints, but haven’t yet posted anything there about this particular problem. The “secured area” is only for the wp-admin directory, and is a security feature that was recommended long ago. It hasn’t changed for over year, so I don’t see how that can be the problem.
      I could live with 3.118 seconds, considering the number of graphics, etc., but pingdom reports an average response time of 6.7 seconds for the last month; 11.3 seconds for the last week, and the latest webpagetest.com results were over 10 and 15 seconds respectively.
      I’m going to revert back to a simpler template again for a few days and see what happens.

      Reply

  3. Did I mention that I’d received a strange prompt when I tried to log onto your site? A box appeared and I was asked for my password. When I tried to x out of that, your blog opened. So, weird, huh?

    Reply

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