Orphaned Plugins

One of the things I try to remind other webfolks I work with to keep in mind is that when you manage a large number of websites, compatibility between your app, your theme and your plugins can make or break performance. One of those bit me over the past couple of days, so I share!

Two of my major sites haven’t been upgraded because of concerns of older coding (calls) in custom themes. One was running WordPress 2.6.5, the other 2.5.1. After checking everything I could think of (or so I thought), I upgraded the 2.6.5 site to 2.7.1… there’s still a 2.8 compatibility question with one of the plugins.

Everything went well, at first. But within 12 hours, the server the site was on was experiencing high loads and crazy mysqld behavior. I resolved that, but the high loads were back within another 24 hours. I resolved the issue again, but the fact that a pattern of wacky behavior was emerging was a concern.

Taking another look at the active plugins on the recently upgraded site yielded a curiosity… an orphaned plugin with no recorded compatibility issues, good or bad. I say orphaned because the plugin was active, but never actively used, not that it’s development was abandoned. It’s usefulness for us was actually superceded by other tools.

Because it was never used, and it never impacted site performance (as in not one problem in the past 4 years), it was “out of sight, out of mind”… never upgraded either. Thus, the version in use was so old that it was not relevant to the things I had checked. But once the plugin was turned off, issues with the site and server disappeared within minutes.

So now I remind myself of one of the things I would on occassion remind other web peers of.