I have a new site that’s grown rather quickly. NSFW http://www.lockedndenied.com with 423 members in 37 days or so. It is WP 3.0.4 and BP 1.2.7 with 30 Plugins.
Achievements, Akisment, All in one SEO, BP Registration Options, BuddyPress, BuddyPress Chat Component, BuddyPress Community Stats, BuddyPress Group Forum Extras, BuddyPress Forum Signature, BuddyPress Group Email Subscription, BuddyPress Like, BuddyPress Links, BuddyPress Mass Messaging, BuddyPress Member Profile Stats, BuddyPress Moderation, Contact Form 7, Easy Albums, Easy timer, Easy Tube, Exclude Pages, Graceful Email Obfuscation, PhotoSmash, Q and A, RSS Importer, Really Simple CAPTCHA, Technical Support, User Activation Keys, WP Ban.
WHEW!
Anyway, recently I have been getting a lot of server timeouts and when 5 or more people are online I get “Service Unavailable.” and 503 Error messages.
My hosting company’s first suggestion was to remove the plugins!
I think these plugins are essential to the fun of the site.
Does anyone have a large and active community site with WP/BP? What issues have you come up with? I’m on a shared server and his second suggestion was to upgrade to “business class”.

Ideas anyone?

[@thealchemist Member 13 years, 11 months ago]

Well, I’ve started trimming down some of the plugins … hopefully this will stop the 503’s.

[@finni3 Participant 13 years, 11 months ago]

Have you tried a caching plugin like W3 Total Cache?

PS What theme are you using`?

[@thealchemist Member 13 years, 11 months ago]

I am using “Citizen Kane” I REALLY like the theme. Using it on http://www.xbox-arena.com, too.

[@thealchemist Member 13 years, 11 months ago]

Unless someone else has a WP-MultiSite with BP and an equivalent number of plugins, I have to assume that it is a server situation. It is, in fact a shared server, so that would account for the constant crashing.
The actual error message is “Service Temporarily Unavailable

The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to maintenance downtime or capacity problems. Please try again later.

Additionally, a 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.

Apache/2.2.16 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.16 OpenSSL/0.9.8e-fips-rhel5 mod_jk/1.2.30 FrontPage/5.0.2.2635 mod_bwlimited/1.4 mod_auth_passthrough/2.1 Server at http://www.lockedndenied.com Port 80″

[@finni3 Participant 13 years, 11 months ago]

You could test with a VPS. (buy one month) Since it is on shared hosting most likely it is a lack of resources.

[@paulhastings0 Participant 13 years, 11 months ago]

I would check the number of queries and speed that your pages pull on average for each pageload. Here’s a link showing a similar method we followed. http://lastblogger.com/archives/339

[@modemlooper Moderator 13 years, 11 months ago]

bet it’s the chat plugin. Also each plugin could have it’s on CSS and javascript files. Did you try using this?

https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/autoptimize/