3 ms·

I'm having a vision of their CTO reading an article about horizontal scalability and his face starts getting red.

by gdulli 12y ago

TheMagicHorsey 12y ago
They don't have a lot of data to serve, though, I imagine. You can store a lot of magazine and blog articles in 64GB of server memory. I don't think they have the kind of scaling problems that more social and peer-to-peer applications have. I could be wrong though. Still it seems they wouldn't have chosen Word Press, unless they really wanted some of the editorial and journalism-focused plugins and features. Some organizations swear by that stuff, and the writers and editors get used to those features. We might not interact with the features that the writers and editors love. So, yeah, though Wordpress is a nightmare, it might still be the best choice for Wired. If I was starting a blog with a community of writers, I might actually just use Google docs for collaborative editing, and then have some sort of publication tool that pushes from Google docs to a more streamlined custom back-end (probably written in Go since I've had a good experience with it so far). But this is just a naive opinion of mine, based on having absolutely no experience with actual journalism and publishing. I imagine I would soon discover many disastrous aspects of my harebrained architecture.
jdub 12y ago
... because you think WordPress doesn't scale horizontally? That's... look, you should probably ask your doctor about WordPress.com. Or any reasonably large WordPress site.
- gdulli 12y ago
  Scaling web servers is easy but there are limits on what a single database instance can support that Wordpress won't address and having multiple sites on multiple database instances is a simple, desirable solution.
  - nacin 12y ago
    WordPress works great sharded and/or replicated across databases, servers, even datacenters. This is what WordPress.com, WordPress.org, and pretty much any major WordPress site uses: https://wordpress.org/plugins/hyperdb/ https://wordpress.org/plugins/hyperdb/.
snowwrestler 12y ago
Content sites scale horizontally at the caching layer--via a CDN, typically. The CMS exists to feed the cache, and should see very little traffic at the application.

I'm having a vision of their CTO reading an article about horizontal scalability and his face starts getting red.

by gdulli 12y ago

I'm having a vision of their CTO reading an article about horizontal scalability and his face starts getting red.

They don't have a lot of data to serve, though, I imagine. You can store a lot of magazine and blog articles in 64GB of server memory. I don't think they have the kind of scaling problems that more social and peer-to-peer applications have. I could be wrong though. Still it seems they wouldn't have chosen Word Press, unless they really wanted some of the editorial and journalism-focused plugins and features. Some organizations swear by that stuff, and the writers and editors get used to those features. We might not interact with the features that the writers and editors love. So, yeah, though Wordpress is a nightmare, it might still be the best choice for Wired. If I was starting a blog with a community of writers, I might actually just use Google docs for collaborative editing, and then have some sort of publication tool that pushes from Google docs to a more streamlined custom back-end (probably written in Go since I've had a good experience with it so far). But this is just a naive opinion of mine, based on having absolutely no experience with actual journalism and publishing. I imagine I would soon discover many disastrous aspects of my harebrained architecture.

jdub 12y ago

... because you think WordPress doesn't scale horizontally? That's... look, you should probably ask your doctor about WordPress.com. Or any reasonably large WordPress site.

gdulli 12y ago
Scaling web servers is easy but there are limits on what a single database instance can support that Wordpress won't address and having multiple sites on multiple database instances is a simple, desirable solution.
- nacin 12y ago
  WordPress works great sharded and/or replicated across databases, servers, even datacenters. This is what WordPress.com, WordPress.org, and pretty much any major WordPress site uses: https://wordpress.org/plugins/hyperdb/ https://wordpress.org/plugins/hyperdb/.

snowwrestler 12y ago

Content sites scale horizontally at the caching layer--via a CDN, typically. The CMS exists to feed the cache, and should see very little traffic at the application.