Well, somehow, I think my GoDaddy account has been updated or moved, because I didn't do anything special (no patches), and this site is now pretty much flying. As I reported a couple of weeks ago, I had isolated some speed issues to the fact that I was on a GoDaddy hosted account with ~3500 other domains.

As one of my friends pointed out, this is not a high-traffic site, so I doubt GoDaddy took a personal  interest in me, or my front-page complaining. It might have just been regularly scheduled server maintenance. Of course, it also could be that no one is actually using their accounts right now, at 5:30ish on a Sunday morning.

Anyway, I hope this keeps up.

Aha! I think I've finally figured out why my site is so slow, even after all the tweaking I've done: it's my host, Godaddy.

It looks like my domain shares its IP address with 3569 other sites. Yikes.

I'm thinking about switching to another host like Dreamhost or HostGator.

It may be that my site speed issues were related to some performance problems with Drupal 6.1. I updated the site to Drupal 6.2, and it seems to be running a bit better, now. It's still not as fast as I'd like, but I'll keep checking the updates page to see if other fixes are published.

So, my site is crawling with Drupal and I'm not sure why. I've installed the Devel module and that's given me some good information, but the only thing I know for sure right now is that my MySQL queries appear to be running fast, my graphics, CSS, and JS are pretty optimized according to yslow, and that PHP execution times are freakin' abysmal.

I've shut off pretty much all non-essential modules, and have turned caching up to its max settings (in administer/performance), but my page execution time is still through the roof.

I'm trying some PHP optimization techniques like increasing memory and ensuring register_globals is off (it was), but so far my success has been minimal.

I'll keep hacking away at this. I wonder if it could be related to my host, Godaddy.

I finally got around to redoing my old blog in Drupal. I decided to use the latest stable version, v6.1. So far, it's pretty good, although I'm still surprised that certain functionality (such as a Rich Text Editor) needs to be added and configured manually.

Also, certain key plugins in Drupal 5x aren't working in v6 yet.. CCK, Views, etc.

However, it does look like the work that's been done with Themes is pretty good - they're MUCH easier to configure in v6 than they were previously.

I plan on messing around with a frame-like theme at some point. Hah, like I have time for that.. maybe I'll surprise myself though.