Why is Your Designer Your Sysadmin Anyway? WordPress and Scaling
June 25th, 2009 by Mickey Panayiotakis
wordpress
I got an email about WordPress today. The summary: Wordpress, at least the public version, does not scale well. So, here I go…
I’m not sure it’s the ‘public’ version that doesn’t scale well. Some gripes with wordpress are really a LAMP stack gripe: Few complain about the L (Linux) and M (MySQL) parts of LAMP. But Apache can be a hog, and PHP has the same issues as any other interpreted language. Plus, no native db connection pooling (a downside of Apache MPM).
In benchmarks, WP out-of-the-box on an untuned server can serve an over 600,000 requests a day. I’d say that’s not bad for something that takes all of an hour to install.
If you want to scale beyond that, I don’t know of anything that can do so without effort. If you want over a million requests a day, you gotta pay someone who knows what they’re doing. (more on that later). секс сайты г нальчика
As for bad plugins…they’re a curse. Designers, non-developers, and non-sysadmins like WordPress because they can throw up some code, add some plug-ins, hack at a theme, and presto they got a website. Then it breaks. Then they blame WordPress. Setting up a WordPress site can be easy; that does not mean that doing so correctly is also easy or simple, and it does not mean that maintaining it is easy or simple. There is no Ronco “set-it-and-forget-it” website. You have to maintain it, keep an eye on those plug-ins, updates, and make sure everything you install is well-tested. So, does WordPress encourage designers to deploy bad plug-ins? Perhaps. But why would a designer be running your site anyway? You won’t let your developer/sysadmin/network guru design your site. Why would you let your designer be your developer/sysadmin/network guru? (If you’re thinking “how bad could a plug-in be?”, the links below tell the tale of one site which went from 30s page load times to under 0.5s load times just be disabling one bad plug-in.)
Back to scalability. Wordpress benches about 650k requests a day out-of-the box. It can bench over a million with a well-designed plug-in or two. Then you can tweak further: WordPress.com gets roughly 250 mil unique visitors/month. Sure, that’s not out of the box; you gotta work a little at it.
Check out:
WordPress.com stats:
http://en.wordpress.com/stats/
Slideshow on WordPress scalability:
http://barry.wordpress.com/2007/07/22/high-performance-wordpress/
Tags: LAMP, Linux, MySQL, PHP, Weblogs, Wordpress, WordPress.com
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