I never fully realized how bad WordPress’ database gets after a while. Plugins leave all sorts of junk behind and it’s just a huge mess. So I started deleting information. Hopefully I didn’t break anything.

This all started because my site got suspended yesterday for using to many server resources. I thought that was odd as I didn’t have a spike in traffic or any new posts. So I started looking for other possibilities.

When looking though the site I found that my subscribe to comments plugin (the original) was capturing thousands of spam emails. I had over 6000 and I think spammers were just attacking it.

So I got a new subscribe to comments plugin, one that was up-to-date and it helped me clean out the bad emails.

I then went into phpMyAdmin and stared poking around in there. Turns out there is all sorts of information from old plugins; such as Ultimate Tag Warrior. Remember that one?

I also found out that Akismet was saving all spam comments, or at least a lot of them. Nearly 3k there that I blew away.

I also dropped tables for plugins that I no longer used.

Plugin developers really have to write uninstall scripts as this is ridiculous.

Overall I feel my database is in better shape, however I’m not sure if I deleted anything important. If so, I have a backup.

This isn’t what I wanted to spend my evening and early morning hours on, but if it helps the server run better, then everyone wins.