Title: loading many comments hammers CPU
Last modified: August 21, 2016

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# loading many comments hammers CPU

 *  [webmystery](https://wordpress.org/support/users/webmystery/)
 * (@webmystery)
 * [12 years, 4 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/loading-many-comments-hammers-cpu/)
 * I manage a very popular site where people can comment on a page displaying a 
   web cam of an owl’s nest. It has become an important social network and this 
   one page receives many comments every day: 4600 for January alone and over 149000
   for the life of this page. [http://starrranch.org/blog/barn-owl/](http://starrranch.org/blog/barn-owl/)
 *  It appears that when WordPress loads a page, it loads *all* of the associated
   comments into memory, regardless of whether they are displayed in the active 
   view, so whenever someone visits a page, or refreshes it to see what their friends
   have posted, the CPU takes a huge hit.
 * I regularly have to go into the database and move older comments onto “archive”
   pages to prevent the CPU from getting hammered and threats of shutdown from the
   hosting provider. Caching plugins like WP Total cache help a little, but if I
   enable the more hard-core settings like browser caching we get complaints because
   people don’t see their comments right away.
 * The commenting feature is important to this site, as public engagement is a major
   factor for the surrounding community as well as for fundraising, so they do not
   wish to limit the comment functionality.
 * It seems to me that this architecture is flawed. I would like to find a way to
   load only the comments that are being viewed, and not to load the other comments
   associated with the page until the pagination navigation is clicked. The theme
   is a simple child theme of twentyeleven, so I don’t think this is a theme issue,
   and I’ve been through plugin triage several times to rule out a plugin issue.
   These CPU problems can always be resolved by reducing the comment footprint on
   the page. Last year I looked into plugins to change the way comments are loaded
   with no success. While a couple of ajax plugins looked promising I didn’t find
   any that worked well on the site.
 * I recognize that most WordPress sites do not generate so many comments per page,
   so this functionality is acceptable under typical conditions. But since a goal
   of having a web site is to reach a wide audience, the fact that commenting does
   not scale up well is problematic.
 * I have floated the idea of switching to a chat-based interaction but I’m not 
   convinced that would be any less resource intensive. Plus, any change to the 
   way the site works is generally not well received and requires re-training of
   all of the users.
 *  I found a couple other posters who identified this problem, but no real solutions
   offered:
    [http://wordpress.org/support/topic/too-much-cpu-usage-comments](http://wordpress.org/support/topic/too-much-cpu-usage-comments)
   [http://wordpress.org/support/topic/the-effect-of-spam-comments-on-hosting-resource-usage-cpu](http://wordpress.org/support/topic/the-effect-of-spam-comments-on-hosting-resource-usage-cpu)
 *  I welcome any feedback or suggestions.

The topic ‘loading many comments hammers CPU’ is closed to new replies.

## Tags

 * [Comments](https://wordpress.org/support/topic-tag/comments/)
 * [cpu](https://wordpress.org/support/topic-tag/cpu/)

 * In: [Fixing WordPress](https://wordpress.org/support/forum/how-to-and-troubleshooting/)
 * 0 replies
 * 1 participant
 * Last reply from: [webmystery](https://wordpress.org/support/users/webmystery/)
 * Last activity: [12 years, 4 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/loading-many-comments-hammers-cpu/)
 * Status: not resolved

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