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So as it turns out DragonBlogger was due for a disaster and the years of testing so many plugins that you uninstall but they leave orphaned database tables behind left not only my database severely bloated but by adding Broken Link Checker in December and having it scan through over 3,500+ posts for broken links was the straw that broke the camels back on the site causing a flow of 502 errors on my Nginx site all over the place randomly for several weeks.
Honestly, I would have had it resolved sooner had I the time to work on it, my day job has been consuming 11 hours per day and I just haven’t had the energy to keep up with my technology blog lately so though I kept running some new information articles and kicked off a new giveaway I just hadn’t the time to give the WordPress site the tender loving care it deserved.
Fortunately I pared down many of my plugins, removed Broken Link Checker, and P3 Performance Profiler is looking pretty good now.
I went from nearly 60 plugins, to so far 35 active ones and my MySQL queries which were as high as 400+ on single posts are down to 84 per visit. I don’t have social share buttons restored yet at this time, and adding 1 plugin at a time and doing full regression tests to see where I would start seeing a jump in pageload performance issues.
This is what I will be doing on my spare time over the next few days until I can get the functionality I need back in and keep the site performance in tip top shape.