Like most people, I have experienced a very frustrating waiting period after I hit Publish in WordPress. It takes forever sometimes. Or the white screen of death: MySQL database access has timed out (or a similar message). Why is this happening?
The default for WordPress is to ping the pingomatic website after a post is published. Look under Options > Write and look under Update Services. There is a reference to pingomatic which pings many, many servers. When all the pinging is done then control is returned…if ever. The default timeout is 15 seconds.
There are several ways around this.
1. Have a service, such as FeedBurner, do your bidding. Delete the entries in the Update Service area and have the service (FeedBurner e.g.) handle your feed. FeedBurner has an option called PingShot which, when activated, will ping pingomatic and other servers. I use a plugin called subscribe me which routes your blog’s feed requests to FeedBurner.
2. A plugin called wp-no-ping-wait will ping the list in Update Service *after* control is returned to WordPress. Thus after Publish button is pressed control is returned almost immediately. The website that handles the plugin has been down for a while so go to this link to get it (the wayback machine). Look for nopingwait2.php. Upload it to your plugin directory and activate it.
3. Delete all entries under Update Service and manually ping the servers yourself using pingoat or pingomatic.
Doug