I have noticed that my newly installed Wordpress Blog has been very slow in publishing a post every single time. 90% of the time, I’ll get a SQL server timeout, SQL related “meta” error or I’ll get the generic Wordpress screen saying that it can’t connect to my SQL Database.

I have traced the problem back to the number of “ping services” my Wordpress blog is trying to access in the “Options > Writing > Update Services” section. In addition to the default “http://rpc.pingomatic.com”, I had put in extra services to ping i.e. 25+ services. It seemed that it was trying to wait for a response from each and everyone of them before successfully publishing the blog post.

I guess I have to learn the hard way. The reason why I say that is because I had recreated multiple SQL databases, tested and installed multiple blogs and even changed Web hosting providers thinking that the problem was with their servers, my Wordpress installation etc. The bright side to this is that I am more educated on what to do and what not to do (being still new at blogging and Wordpress), I can probably backup and restore a Wordpress Database with my eyes close ;-) and also ended up finding a better/cheaper web host (i.e. [1] 1and1).

After further digging and research, I stumbled across articles and plugins confirming my suspicions. This is a good plugin to stop the pinging wait, timeouts and publish your blog faster (courtesy of Robert Dearton from his [2] Something Unpredictable website):

[3] nopingwait2.php - For WP 2.0+

For my future reference sake (and probably others), there is also a good comprehensive and cleaned up “ping service” list at [4] Instant Info Online via [5] Wordpress (the webpage offers more ping services and info but I just wanted to copy this one down on my blog just incase that page was taken down or moved):

http://rpc.pingomatic.com
http://ping.weblogs.se/
http://blogmatcher.com/u.php
http://coreblog.org/ping/
http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates
http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc
http://trackback.bakeinu.jp/bakeping.php
http://ping.myblog.jp
http://ping.bitacoras.com
http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/
http://ping.blogmura.jp/rpc/
http://xmlrpc.blogg.de
http://1470.net/api/ping
http://bblog.com/ping.php
http://blog.goo.ne.jp/XMLRPC

Life is good now in Wordpress land, until I next try to tweak or hack it.