Reduce Server Load Using Akismet to Automatically Discard Spam Comments on Posts Older than A Month

Most websites receives a few thousands of spam comments, pingbacks and trackbacks everyday. The massive and tremendous amount of spam causes some annoying problems such as impossible to browse through the comments caught and labeled as spam to identify those comments that are wrongly or mistakenly filtered as spam. Beside, continuous stream in of spam comments, track backs or ping backs can be considered as DDOS (Denial of Service) attacks, as the spam triggers a lot of TCP connections over a short span of time on the web server.

To make matter worse, all these spams are going to be recorded and inserted into MySQL databases, due to design of WordPress blog, where all contents are stored in databases exclusively. Thus each additional spam will make MySQL database to work harder, take out a little bit server system resources, CPU share and memory, and directly causing the web server to process genuine authenticate HTTP web request slower. Hence, the websites and web pages hosted on the server are loading more slowly, especially on server with blogs that consistently been flooded with spam comments.

Akismet, a efficient and must have anti-spam protection plugin for WordPress, has a feature that can eliminate the load on MySQL database server caused by spam comments. The idea is simple, to automatically and directly discard all those comments made on blog posts that are older than a month, and are been identified as spam by Akismet. In other words, once Akismet tags a comment, trackback or pingback as spam, the comment is automatically dropped and discarded, without saving the comment to MySQL database again. This function will greatly reduce server load and will certainly help webmasters and bloggers who having constraint on web hosting budget and have to rely on lower specification hosting service such as shared hosting.

To enable the automatically discard function, simply login to the WordPress admin page, then click on Plugins, follow by Akismet Configuration. This is also where WordPress.com API Key is entered. At the bottom of the page, select and tick the check box for Automatically discard spam comments on posts older than a month. option. Click on Update options button when done. Once turned on, the comments found in Akismet Spam tab will greatly reduced. But of course, the con of this option is that the valid comments made on posts older than 1 month that have wrongly identified by Akismet is also been deleted. But that’s a choice to be made between dealing with spam and effort to save a small amount of genuine comments, which when mix with hundreds or thousands of other spams, may be hard to identified too.