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>Although Wordpress crashing under load is what caused me to switch to Octopress. It's all about the caching plugins. I had my blog hit 300k visits in the span

>Although Wordpress crashing under load is what caused me to switch to Octopress. It's all about the caching plugins. I had my blog hit 300k visits in the span of 8 hours, peaking at about 100 visits per second on a shared web host. Utilizing cashing plugins means every single person that visited my blog was served static content that refreshed itself every 10 minutes.

minimaxir 13y ago
My Wordpress blog on Dreamhost shared hosting w/ WP Super Cache and Cloudflare could easily handle 100 visits/second. 200 visits/second caused blank pages half the time. 300 visits/second? Boom.
- RKearney 13y ago
  I've never used WP Super Cache so I can't comment there, but having used W3 Total Cache I can say that the performance I get with W3 Total Cache is exactly the same as when I tried out Jekyll/Octopress since both solutions are only serving static HTML files and nothing else. Then again, 300 visits per second, estimating 250KB for the entire page (css, js, images, etc) is about 75Mbps which is going to be a lot to ask from any shared hosting provider.
  - ryandonsullivan 13y ago
    Another thing to look at is using nginx as a web server. It's a lot more lightweight than Apache. Paired with a solid SSD drive and varnish caching, and you can get some really great performance out of WordPress.
    - jacques_chester 13y ago
      I've seen Varnish choke on mainline code: the Recent Comments widget, which can invalidate an entire site whenever a comment is posted anywhere. I have one site which caused both WPEngine and Page.ly to lock up on just 30k views/day because of that. What I do with my VPS: 1. WP Supercache is configured to write .html.gz copies to disk. 2. Nginx is configured to check if such a file exists before referring anything to PHP. If it finds the .html.gz, it will serve it directly from disk. Ordinary file caching gives it the advantages Varnish promises. 3. WP Supercache appears to correctly handle invalidation when a new comment is posted.
- pavs 13y ago
  Probably had less to do with wordpress and more to do with shared hosting setup (memory allocation, disk space, process allocation and upstream bandwidth). Wordpress can handle insane amount of traffic if you know what you are doing. 99% of wordpress borking under sudden spike in traffic issues can be boiled down to - Not using caching - Using shared hosting

minimaxir 13y ago

My Wordpress blog on Dreamhost shared hosting w/ WP Super Cache and Cloudflare could easily handle 100 visits/second. 200 visits/second caused blank pages half the time. 300 visits/second? Boom.

RKearney 13y ago
I've never used WP Super Cache so I can't comment there, but having used W3 Total Cache I can say that the performance I get with W3 Total Cache is exactly the same as when I tried out Jekyll/Octopress since both solutions are only serving static HTML files and nothing else. Then again, 300 visits per second, estimating 250KB for the entire page (css, js, images, etc) is about 75Mbps which is going to be a lot to ask from any shared hosting provider.
- ryandonsullivan 13y ago
  Another thing to look at is using nginx as a web server. It's a lot more lightweight than Apache. Paired with a solid SSD drive and varnish caching, and you can get some really great performance out of WordPress.
  - jacques_chester 13y ago
    I've seen Varnish choke on mainline code: the Recent Comments widget, which can invalidate an entire site whenever a comment is posted anywhere. I have one site which caused both WPEngine and Page.ly to lock up on just 30k views/day because of that. What I do with my VPS: 1. WP Supercache is configured to write .html.gz copies to disk. 2. Nginx is configured to check if such a file exists before referring anything to PHP. If it finds the .html.gz, it will serve it directly from disk. Ordinary file caching gives it the advantages Varnish promises. 3. WP Supercache appears to correctly handle invalidation when a new comment is posted.
pavs 13y ago
Probably had less to do with wordpress and more to do with shared hosting setup (memory allocation, disk space, process allocation and upstream bandwidth). Wordpress can handle insane amount of traffic if you know what you are doing. 99% of wordpress borking under sudden spike in traffic issues can be boiled down to - Not using caching - Using shared hosting