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WordPress is garbage unless you statically cache the generated html. I haven't been able to keep the servers running on even medium traffic sites doing anything

WordPress is garbage unless you statically cache the generated html. I haven't been able to keep the servers running on even medium traffic sites doing anything else. It's simply far too slow. On anything short of a supercomputer you can get about ten requests per second with the stock setup and zero content/plugins. Adding anything to the site just makes that number worse. My rule has become don't use WordPress for anything but html generation. It's not a serious CMS for anything else

blakesterz 10y ago
I'm curious what does a "medium traffic site" mean? I feel like I have a bunch of what I'd call "medium traffic sites" and I've not had much of a problem with them. Though, maybe my "medium" is actually "small"? Is there a general rule of thumb for site traffic? Like a "medium traffic site" gets X Hits, or whatever?
- brianwawok 10y ago
  100 requests / sec average seems medium traffic to me (and outside the bounds of wordpress live)
  - ac29 10y ago
    8.6 million requests/day is only medium traffic?
    - brianwawok 10y ago
      Sure. Well let's call it 1 million per day peaking at 100 req/sec... not many websites are steady state 24/7 But this is orders of magnitude below what a Google or Espn or Amazon do. But orders of magnitude over what 1 PHP server can do. (But oddly enough, within the realm of possibility for a good Java or Go or Rust server)
      - NYMD 10y ago
        Nonsense. I just ran a load test against WP yesterday and with a traffic load (from tsung cluster) peaking at 430 req/sec, it was easily served by 5 t2.micros running Varnish + WP (behind Apache no less) + memcached. The load test included random search strings 50% of the time so half the tsung visitors were getting live service from Wordpress.
alexpatin 10y ago
Ever used the WP-API? It is a REST API and you can bypass the native templating system and even the WP admin entirely. There are plenty of people are building web apps with WP/WP-API as the back-end. WordPress is a lot more than it used to be.
- throwawaydbfif 10y ago
  Last time I used the API it was incomplete and slow. The "multi request mode" also exposes all sorts of resource exhuastion attacks. I had a ton of sites go down from "bundled" login attempts where they tried something like 100 passwords at once. I usually end up blocking it completely
- godzillabrennus 10y ago
  The Wordpress backend still has scaling issues with many popular plugins. Helping a site with 100,000 customers in a woocommerce database migrate to a more robust ecommerce solution because it takes 15 minutes to log in currently.
notacoward 10y ago
For a while I did something similar. I used a private instance of WP to generate my blog content and then scraped the site to get static pages which I could then serve from another machine. That meant nothing dynamic, no WP "vuln of the week" treadmill, and no cache-layer validation headaches either. It worked pretty well. For a larger site I could have made the generation more selective, and (re)optimized the output in many different ways, but it wasn't worth it. Then I got off WP entirely and it was all a moot point, but it's an approach to consider for those stuck in WP-land.
devwastaken 10y ago
Plenty of sites would like to disagree with you. Nginx and PHP7.1-FPM will make it quite fast, even on a $5 DO server. Caching will speed it up quite a lot more, but you should always have your pages behind a cache, thats one of the points of a CMS is to generate you html that is stored until modification.
joaoperibeiro 10y ago
I don't agree that WordPress is as bad as your saying... But the static HTML caching part can be easily achieved, with plugins or with Cloudflare for instance.

blakesterz 10y ago

I'm curious what does a "medium traffic site" mean? I feel like I have a bunch of what I'd call "medium traffic sites" and I've not had much of a problem with them. Though, maybe my "medium" is actually "small"? Is there a general rule of thumb for site traffic? Like a "medium traffic site" gets X Hits, or whatever?

brianwawok 10y ago
100 requests / sec average seems medium traffic to me (and outside the bounds of wordpress live)
- ac29 10y ago
  8.6 million requests/day is only medium traffic?
  - brianwawok 10y ago
    Sure. Well let's call it 1 million per day peaking at 100 req/sec... not many websites are steady state 24/7 But this is orders of magnitude below what a Google or Espn or Amazon do. But orders of magnitude over what 1 PHP server can do. (But oddly enough, within the realm of possibility for a good Java or Go or Rust server)
    - NYMD 10y ago
      Nonsense. I just ran a load test against WP yesterday and with a traffic load (from tsung cluster) peaking at 430 req/sec, it was easily served by 5 t2.micros running Varnish + WP (behind Apache no less) + memcached. The load test included random search strings 50% of the time so half the tsung visitors were getting live service from Wordpress.

alexpatin 10y ago

Ever used the WP-API? It is a REST API and you can bypass the native templating system and even the WP admin entirely. There are plenty of people are building web apps with WP/WP-API as the back-end. WordPress is a lot more than it used to be.

throwawaydbfif 10y ago
Last time I used the API it was incomplete and slow. The "multi request mode" also exposes all sorts of resource exhuastion attacks. I had a ton of sites go down from "bundled" login attempts where they tried something like 100 passwords at once. I usually end up blocking it completely
godzillabrennus 10y ago
The Wordpress backend still has scaling issues with many popular plugins. Helping a site with 100,000 customers in a woocommerce database migrate to a more robust ecommerce solution because it takes 15 minutes to log in currently.

notacoward 10y ago

For a while I did something similar. I used a private instance of WP to generate my blog content and then scraped the site to get static pages which I could then serve from another machine. That meant nothing dynamic, no WP "vuln of the week" treadmill, and no cache-layer validation headaches either. It worked pretty well. For a larger site I could have made the generation more selective, and (re)optimized the output in many different ways, but it wasn't worth it. Then I got off WP entirely and it was all a moot point, but it's an approach to consider for those stuck in WP-land.

devwastaken 10y ago

Plenty of sites would like to disagree with you. Nginx and PHP7.1-FPM will make it quite fast, even on a $5 DO server. Caching will speed it up quite a lot more, but you should always have your pages behind a cache, thats one of the points of a CMS is to generate you html that is stored until modification.

joaoperibeiro 10y ago

I don't agree that WordPress is as bad as your saying... But the static HTML caching part can be easily achieved, with plugins or with Cloudflare for instance.