It’s been a week since I upgraded to WordPress 2.6.1 and so far, so good. The upgrade hasn’t been without problems.
The first problem was some kind of race condition which resulted in WordPress chewing up a lot of CPU cycles. This wasn’t entirely unexpected since it’s happened every single time I’ve ever upgraded a WordPress version. I wish I had more insight into this problem but it settled down after a day or so.
The second problem was that I had a problem publishing one post because of its content. Some word or combination of words in the body of the post caused WordPress to throw 503 (permissions) errors. Ultimately, I was able to publish the post but, unfortunately, I couldn’t isolate what in the content was inducing the error.
Subsequent to the upgrade I’ve installed the Bad Behavior anti-spam plug-in and I’m thrilled with its results. In the last week I’ve been subjected to nearly 40,000 comment and trackback spams and my anti-spam measures trapped and eliminated all but two or three or them. Bad Behavior seems to do its work with a lower CPU penalty than my other anti-spam measures so it’s good news all around.
