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10 Million hits a day with Wordpress using a $15 server

ewanleith.com

1–10 of 115 posts

Re: 10 Million hits a day with Wordpress using a $15 server

#3
post #2

What about memory usage with MySql? I've found that to be a significant bottleneck with wordpress sites. A basic wordpress installation doesn't use the database much, but if you add just a few plugins, things start to jump pretty quickly.

I didn't play around with MySQL in those settings at all, mostly because the last thing you actually want is a query hitting the database.

You're right though, if you start adding a few less well coded plugins, then you can start hitting the database a lot, for no really good reason.

Re: 10 Million hits a day with Wordpress using a $15 server

#5
post #2

What about memory usage with MySql? I've found that to be a significant bottleneck with wordpress sites. A basic wordpress installation doesn't use the database much, but if you add just a few plugins, things start to jump pretty quickly.

The caching software and http accelerator probably mitigate the need to hit the database at all.

Re: 10 Million hits a day with Wordpress using a $15 server

#6
Try it again with just the last step(vanilla apache/vanilla wordpress/varnish) what are your results like?

Keep the original setup and have your test script perform some random searches. New figures?

(Everything is fast/non-server intensive when you're serving static data)

Re: 10 Million hits a day with Wordpress using a $15 server

#7
post #6

Try it again with just the last step(vanilla apache/vanilla wordpress/varnish) what are your results like? Keep the original setup and have your test script perform some random searches. New figures? (Everything is fast/non-server intensive when you're serving static data)

I think the main difference between using Apache vs nginx as the backend server would be the amount of memory available for Varnish to use for caching. nginx has a much smaller memory footprint.

Re: 10 Million hits a day with Wordpress using a $15 server

#8
post #4

TL;DR - Vanilla ubuntu, configure firewall, install nginx, install wordpress, turn on wordpress caching, install and configure varnish.

Pretty much, yeah - though if you don't know what settings to put on nginx and varnish, you'll end up wasting most of the performance.

I'm sure my configurations aren't perfect, but they're a lot better than the defaults they ship with, and there doesn't seem to be a lot of "Here's some sensible settings" discussion on either project's website.

Re: 10 Million hits a day with Wordpress using a $15 server

#10
This is good but let's look at from slightly different perspective. The author (Ewan) is so good, so I'll assume his hourly cost runs anywhere between $50 to $80 an hour on sys op.

Taking the least denominator - $50, if he spends just 5 hours a month trying to keep his server alive, active, update and making sure it's not down, responding to it if anything happens - that will cost him $200 + $15 per month to maintain his setup.

If you're about running a well maintained popular Wordpress powered blog, why go to the extend of doing it yourself when you can spend a little more, let the people who runs such services handle it. That way, you can keep doing your more productive work.

Unless, of course, he does nothing else but earns via the website, does it full-time and is happy spending his 4-hour a week on running the server.

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