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TLDR; Install caching plugins to wordpress, run on a server that is oversized about 100x for steady state load. Which I guess works, but is not that interestin

TLDR; Install caching plugins to wordpress, run on a server that is oversized about 100x for steady state load. Which I guess works, but is not that interesting of a technical read? If you were not on wordpress, I bet you could have served that load from a single VM on a cloud provider, with the ability to scale as needed.

driverdan 9y ago
Plus it's behind CloudFlare which should absorb a lot of the traffic if headers are configured correctly.
- jlgaddis 9y ago
  Yes, ~97% or so, as the author noted in TFA.
lee_ars 9y ago
> TLDR; Install caching plugins to wordpress... Clarification: the "caching plugins" are just administrative tie-ins to Varnish and Cloudflare, not actual plugins that make WP perform any caching at the WP application layer. The site doesn't use W3 Total Cache or WP Super Cache or any other popular WP cache plugin. (edit - at the wordpress application layer, i mean—talking about that specifically, not layer 7 cache in general)
CharlesW 9y ago
Here's the actual TLDR from the article: * Dedicated hardware server—no shared hosting * Gigabit uplink to handle burst traffic * Varnish cache with lots of RAM * Plugin-light WordPress installation * Off-box stats via WordPress/Jetpack * Cloudflare as a CDN * No heavy dependencies (i.e., ad networks)
- js2 9y ago
  And really "Cloudflare as a CDN" was the most important. It absorbed almost all of the traffic: Between August 22 and August 30, Cloudflare served over five terabytes of cached Space City Weather content via Cloudflare’s CDN. Only about 145GB worth of requests had to be served by the Space City Weather Web server itself. [...] Looking at raw requests instead of bytes, Cloudflare handled about 88 percent of those, too, with only about 12 percent of requests passed back up the chain to the origin server. The origin server ended up seeing peaks of 50 RPS, most of that was absorbed by Varnish. I guess 50 RPS is a lot for WordPress, though I'm surprised given the origin server is a decent box: The server has a quad-core Xeon E3-1230 CPU, 16GB of RAM, and mirrored R1 SSDs.
DKnoll 9y ago
Why do you think you can't run WordPress on a VPS? Also scaling hardware is the last resort, there are almost always cheaper optimisations to be made.

driverdan 9y ago

Plus it's behind CloudFlare which should absorb a lot of the traffic if headers are configured correctly.

jlgaddis 9y ago
Yes, ~97% or so, as the author noted in TFA.

lee_ars 9y ago

> TLDR; Install caching plugins to wordpress... Clarification: the "caching plugins" are just administrative tie-ins to Varnish and Cloudflare, not actual plugins that make WP perform any caching at the WP application layer. The site doesn't use W3 Total Cache or WP Super Cache or any other popular WP cache plugin. (edit - at the wordpress application layer, i mean—talking about that specifically, not layer 7 cache in general)

CharlesW 9y ago

Here's the actual TLDR from the article: * Dedicated hardware server—no shared hosting * Gigabit uplink to handle burst traffic * Varnish cache with lots of RAM * Plugin-light WordPress installation * Off-box stats via WordPress/Jetpack * Cloudflare as a CDN * No heavy dependencies (i.e., ad networks)

js2 9y ago
And really "Cloudflare as a CDN" was the most important. It absorbed almost all of the traffic: Between August 22 and August 30, Cloudflare served over five terabytes of cached Space City Weather content via Cloudflare’s CDN. Only about 145GB worth of requests had to be served by the Space City Weather Web server itself. [...] Looking at raw requests instead of bytes, Cloudflare handled about 88 percent of those, too, with only about 12 percent of requests passed back up the chain to the origin server. The origin server ended up seeing peaks of 50 RPS, most of that was absorbed by Varnish. I guess 50 RPS is a lot for WordPress, though I'm surprised given the origin server is a decent box: The server has a quad-core Xeon E3-1230 CPU, 16GB of RAM, and mirrored R1 SSDs.

DKnoll 9y ago

Why do you think you can't run WordPress on a VPS? Also scaling hardware is the last resort, there are almost always cheaper optimisations to be made.