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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

#81

Post by Zombieball »

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…

I think "a $4217/mo CDN bill" may be a bit of an exaggeration :p I honestly had no idea how much CDN's charge, threw some rough stats into AWS Monthly calculator for CloudFront (596GB/Month, 500kb avg. object size) and the bill was only $73.87 /month. Call me surprised!

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

#82

Post by shuzchen »

kijin wrote: post #79

> echo “deb http://nginx.org/packages/ubuntu/ lucid nginx” >> /etc/apt/sources.list Shouldn't that be "oneiric" since you're using Ubuntu 11.10? Or does the nginx team compile everything statically so it works no matter which version you choose? I'm also a bit puzzled with your decision to make PHP run as the "nginx" user. You probably did this to match the username that the nginx debs use (Ubuntu's default package u…

If you've got your php code and static assets in the same repo, then it's generally easiest to have php and nginx run as the same user that owns the files in that repo. php needs access to those file to parse/run them, and nginx needs access to those (static) files to serve them.

Of course, you can manage this in other, more security conscious ways (move static assets elsewhere, use group permissions, etc.) but this is probably the simplest.

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

#83

Post by jonknee »

Zombieball wrote: post #81
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…

I think "a $4217/mo CDN bill" may be a bit of an exaggeration :p I honestly had no idea how much CDN's charge, threw some rough stats into AWS Monthly calculator for CloudFront (596GB/Month, 500kb avg. object size) and the bill was only $73.87 /month. Call me surprised!

Sounds about right to me. How did you get to 596GB? That seems very low for 300,000,000 visits (remember this was a daily figure, but you're paying by the month). If you have 10 requests per visit (reasonable for the low end) that turns into a cool 3B requests. That itself is $2,250 a month.

A million visits times 500KB = 476.84GB. Per day, so 14TB per month. At best that's another $1,600 a month.

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

#84

Post by jiggy2011 »

lukeholder wrote: post #76
jiggy2011 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think CMS engines like wordpress are great for semi technical people who are curious enough to set stuff up themselves. However whenever I've had a website to develop I've never seen the point of using one. If the website is going to be very simple the chances are it doesn't really need a full on CMS. All it needs is an HTML/CSS layout and some content that can come from either static HTML files, a few form handler…

Your forgetting that this favors your more than them. People dont want to learn a new system, and they are confortable with wordpress. There are millions of devs and designers also familiar with wordpress - which can mean they can leave you in an instant and get anyone else to make changes or add feature to the site easily.

That's assuming they are already familiar with wordpress, most people have never used a CMS in their life.

If requirements are simple then all you generally need is an admin area with about 3-4 links.

Something like:

Change Homepage Text

Show Customer Inquiries

Add Item to catalog

This is much easier to understand to a newbie than "Add Page" , "Add menu item" etc. If they want complicated changes they will usually end up calling me anyway.

I always keep the coding for my simple sites simple enough that any competent developer should be able to figure it all out in an hour or so anyway.

Many people who are not technically inclined do not have time to do much modification to their website themselves, so will generally not bother if you give them something with a lot of power like a full CMS.

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

#85

Post by kijin »

shuzchen wrote: post #82
kijin wrote: post #79

> echo “deb http://nginx.org/packages/ubuntu/ lucid nginx” >> /etc/apt/sources.list Shouldn't that be "oneiric" since you're using Ubuntu 11.10? Or does the nginx team compile everything statically so it works no matter which version you choose? I'm also a bit puzzled with your decision to make PHP run as the "nginx" user. You probably did this to match the username that the nginx debs use (Ubuntu's default package u…

If you've got your php code and static assets in the same repo, then it's generally easiest to have php and nginx run as the same user that owns the files in that repo. php needs access to those file to parse/run them, and nginx needs access to those (static) files to serve them. Of course, you can manage this in other, more security conscious ways (move static assets elsewhere, use group permissions, etc.) but this…

Most files and directories have 644/755 permissions by default, which means they can be owned by any user and still be accessible (readable) to any other user on the same system. What really matters is who can write to those files and directories, and there's no reason for anything other than "wp-content" to be writable by the web server. WordPress blogs get exploited all the time, so a bit of paranoia can't hurt.

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

#86

Post by infinitex »

masklinn wrote: post #12
etrain wrote: post #4

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

Isn't there any kind of static generator for Wordpress? I'd expect a static wordpress + nginx would be sufficient to handle quite a serious load.

Yes, the is: Really Static http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/really-static/

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

#87

Post by hkarthik »

IanDrake wrote: post #78
hkarthik wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Really? That's interesting. I assumed the WP caching was straight page output caching.

Some of the cache plugins may just utilize page output caching, but IMO if you're spinning up your language runtime (Ruby, PHP, Python, Java, .NET) just to do page caching, you've already lost. Varnish and even built in Web Server caching can be far more efficient.

It's better to use the language runtime for more specific caching inside your application logic and for smarter cache expiration.

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

#88

Post by cheald »

EwanToo wrote: post #27
antirez wrote: post #9

A blog is the most simple to scale application, just one step after the static content. The fact that wordpress has traditionally been not very scalable always used to puzzle me...

I do wonder why W3 Total Cache or one of the other options isn't a standard feature of Wordpress.

Caching produces confusion, is my guess. You have to know it's there to realize how to fix the "oops, I made changes and they aren't showing up" issues.

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

#89

Post by Estragon »

philip1209 wrote: post #65
antirez wrote: post #9

A blog is the most simple to scale application, just one step after the static content. The fact that wordpress has traditionally been not very scalable always used to puzzle me...

Is there some good Python-based blogging system that would be more scalable?

Check out the wiki page for python blogging systems: http://wiki.python.org/moin/PythonBlogSoftware

Blaag and Hyde generate static html, which is about as scalable as you can get, w.r.t. speed.

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