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

ewanleith.com

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

#51

Post by EwanToo »

rkalla wrote: post #50

FWIW: Amazon's Micro instances will burst to saturate unused CPU cycles on the host machine up to a hard-capped limit before being choked to death by the hypervisor. Had he run the Blitz test for 10 mins or more you would see the spike in traffic up, beyond what you think a Micro should sustain, and then it plummet to near 0 for a disturbingly long period of time[1]. If you are unlucky enough to have a Micro on a hos…

No problem, no offence taken :)

I only picked the micro because it's cheap, and AWS let me fire one up, build the config, break it, trash it, and start again, all in rapid succession.

One thing though, this configuration doesn't actually need much real CPU or disk resources - it's pretty much all memory, and as far as I know, AWS doesn't overcommit RAM. this means it should be "relatively" stable. The CPU usage is at around 5-10% even at the peak.

Personally, my own blog runs on Linode, because I think EBS is broken, but each to their own :)

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

#52

Post by mcdowall »

terryjsmith wrote: post #22

As someone who worked as lead dev for a blog network that does 10M+ visitors a month, here's the thing: if you've gotten your blog to 10M hits a day, you likely have a massive amount of content (we had about 1M posts over 5 or 6 years and about as many comments); that is, far too much to get into cache on a $15 server. Every page gets cached, every gallery page gets cached (if you've got photo galleries), every comme…

I can't agree more with this, we've just redesigned a site with 50m+ per mo with articles in the hundreds of thousands. Akamai Caching and google indexing alone can turn a relatively steady paced site into a snail.

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

#53

Post by brokentone »

Kudos for the step-by-step benchmarking. However, ideal situations and no business requirements can give you pretty impressive statistics. The most load producing elements of every Wordpress site I've worked on have been necessary to pay the bills, allow a reasonable workflow for content creators, or provide good user experience.

When you load in a sizable theme, warm up the DB with thousands of posts, tens of thousands of comments and users, and have requirements of short TTLs for new stories to be posted, comment administration, etc, and real world traffic... the picture looks a little different.

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

#55

Post by padobson »

gumbah wrote: post #48
kaiuhl wrote: post #46

The hallmark of Wordpress is ease of use. That's why you can spin up a blog right on their site, and they have a backend designed by Happy Cog. Wordpress is blog software for the technically illiterate. And then I take a look at this blog post that lists all the incantations necessary to scale Wordpress to reasonable scale and I wonder why anyone should do this. If you're setting up your own server, installing nginx,…

"I wonder why anyone should do this" - Because you're setting this up for a "technically illiterate" client?

+1 - Nothing like being able to show a client who's got a billion dollar idea that his site can handle 10M users for $15/mo.

Just remember to explain all the caveats that are being discussed here. We're nothing without out integrity. Your client won't be listening to that point though, he'll only be excited he's going to be a billionaire for $15/mo.

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

#56

Post by Brajeshwar »

Brajeshwar wrote: post #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…

My blog is not that popular with millions of visits of a month but it's decent enough to choke and die under most shared hosting. Well, I once setup my Wordpress Blog to run on Linode's cheapest server with nginx, wp-cache, and all the jazz. But then I kinda remained tense most of the time and even minor instances at the wrong time give me the bumps.

Now, I use Page.ly and CloudFlare in the front (WPEngine is an equally good host and I'm considering for another Wordpress Setup of mine) and I don't even care about the host, I just care about my blog and how to update it with articles. It's costlier but it comes with it's reward.

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

#57

Post by showerst »

kaiuhl wrote: post #46

The hallmark of Wordpress is ease of use. That's why you can spin up a blog right on their site, and they have a backend designed by Happy Cog. Wordpress is blog software for the technically illiterate. And then I take a look at this blog post that lists all the incantations necessary to scale Wordpress to reasonable scale and I wonder why anyone should do this. If you're setting up your own server, installing nginx,…

The thing is this - configuring a server is one set of problems, building a decent CMS database/backend is another set of problems, and building a decent browser-based UX for content authoring is a third set.

Very few people have all three of these skills, and it's fair to say that 2 and 3 are not yet solved problems. Rolling your own CMS for any non-trivial purpose is always something that sounds like a good idea until you try it, and then you start hitting all of the incredible idiosyncrasies and speed bumps that other CMS have already solved, even if they've done it poorly.

I'm not exactly defending Wordpress and its lousy code, but in my experience with publishing CMSs, if it's powerful enough to flex to non-trivial needs (Modern WP, Drupal, Django, CQ, etc), then it's probably going to feel like a bloated/complex mess to a programmer, because of all the nuances in the problem space.

Having worked on both sides of this one, i'd rather solve the 'scale this crappy software' problem than the 'Build a useable UX solution that does everything we need and works on mobile and in IE8' problem.

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

#58

Post by danielrm26 »

Well done on the article, man -- very detailed.

I would say you should dump the caching plugin, however, and just do everything it's doing in nginx itself. My mix also adds CloudFlare as a caching system:

http://danielmiessler.com/blog/how-to-run-a-wicked-fast-word...

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

#59

Post by hkarthik »

IanDrake wrote: post #54

Great article. Question: If you have Varnish running as a cache, should you really have the WP 3W Cache plugin running too? Seems redundant, but I'm not familiar this tech.

Varnish caches the actual HTTP requests, and speeds up static content substantially by removing the necessity to load up PHP.

WP caching speeds up requests that spin up PHP by preventing them from making a connection to the MySQL Database. This is useful for requests that may peruse multiple blog posts, but load the exact same sidebar content by caching things like post counts, categories, tag clouds, etc.

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

#60

Post by EwanToo »

danielrm26 wrote: post #58

Well done on the article, man -- very detailed. I would say you should dump the caching plugin, however, and just do everything it's doing in nginx itself. My mix also adds CloudFlare as a caching system: http://danielmiessler.com/blog/how-to-run-a-wicked-fast-word...

Thanks, will take a look at your post later :-)
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