Technology Tales

Adventures in consumer and enterprise technology

TOPIC: STRUCTURED STORAGE

How complexity can blind you

17th August 2025

Visitors may not have noticed it, but I was having a lot of trouble with this website. Intermittent slowdowns beset any attempt to add new content or perform any other administration. This was not happening on any other web portal that I had, even one sharing the same publishing software.

Even so, WordPress did get the blame at first, at least when deactivating plugins had no effect. Then, it was the turn of the web server, resulting in a move to something more powerful and my leaving Apache for Nginx at the same time. Redis caching was another suspect, especially when things got in a twist on the new instance. As if that were not enough, MySQL came in for some scrutiny too.

Finally, another suspect emerged: Cloudflare. Either some settings got mangled or something else was happening, but cutting out that intermediary was enough to make things fly again. Now, I use bunny.net for DNS duties instead, and the simplification has helped enormously; the previous layering was no help with debugging. With a bit of care, I might add some other tools behind the scenes while taking things slowly to avoid confusion in the future.

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