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My experience with WPEngine

chester.id.au

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Re: My experience with WPEngine

#161

Post by ashray »

jacques_chester wrote: post #100
ashray wrote: post #96

From the article comments: > It’s a quiet backwater. Collectively the sites would have maybe 20k unique visitors a day. 50k is a big day hereabouts. I'm not quite sure why this blog is such a huge problem to host. It appears that the author has some customizations (plugins..) that are really slow. In fact, I would suggest to the author to hire a good developer, fix those core issues (say slow SQL queries, etc.). It m…

> It appears that the author has some customizations (plugins..) that are really slow. The slowest piece of code on the network today is the Recent Comments Widget. That's not a plugin, that's right there in the base install. I worked this out myself, based on preliminary detective work by Page.ly. And then Page.ly went the rest of the way to ask a Wordpress core contributor for their opinion. The key issue is that t…

> The key issue is that this widget performs a query on the wp_comments table which becomes slower and slower as the number of comments rises..

I dont' see why a selective read based on primary key indexes is taking so long. How many rows are we talking about here ? I'm sure it's under a billion rows - right ? Partitioning it may help but I think there's something significantly wrong with the way the lookup is going through.

The recent comments widget is probably doing things the wrong way around. Is it caching the returned values ? Does it matter if the recent comments widget is based on data that is.. say 2 minutes old ?

I really don't agree with your performance bottlenecks. I run several sites much larger (at-least 20x traffic per day) and granted that they do not all run Wordpress, I know from experience that your system should not be grinding to a halt with just 50k daily uniques.

Even imagining that the comments lookup is like "get all comments for post ID, 2966 --" - that can't possibly be slow enough to destroy your entire server setup. Maybe you just need more RAM ?

Get a dedicated box and get someone to optimize it. If your entire database can be in RAM (Get a box with 16GB of RAM ?), that should work well. That won't cost you $250/month even.

EDIT: I see from another post: As Sean, my head SysAdmin wrote on a ticket to you, some of your pages were performing a sort on 188590 rows in memory each time.

Was that the recent comments widget doing that ? Well, that can be fixed with some clever caching or even a clever fetch technique!

Is that necessary for every load ? Do you have a particular blog post with that many comments ? The right way to go about that would be to pick out comments for a particular post and then sort them - query-wise. Again, your WP install probably needs some (much needed) tuning.

I understand your desire to have someone else worry about your servers, but someone also (apparently) has to worry about your code, and as I understand right now - that person is you. Well, you could definitely make some code level improvements and save on the 'server management' department.

Re: My experience with WPEngine

#162

Post by georgemcbay »

armandososa wrote: post #46
jacques_chester wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then compare it to Page.ly. Same basic proposition: fully managed Wordpress. They cost less. And their service roflstomps WPEngine's.

…and they never accepted my credit card. Just because you have a bad experience it doesn't mean that it sucks. My experience with WPEngine has been fantastic.

Basically all services have a group of satisfied users and a group of unsatisfied users.

What blows a story like this up (as much as hitting the front-page of HN is 'blowing up') isn't that a service failed to meet the needs of one blogger, but rather that the people running the service respond to criticism (in public) sounding more like petulant children than professionals.

As someone not into blogging, I'm not that familiar with WPEngine, but based on comments here that link to various twitter comments now I suddenly have a negative-leaning opinion of them. Primarily because they couldn't take a negative review without calling the poster a "hater". (FWIW, a lot of my negative opinion is tied up in this stupid word, which IME comes out as a last resort when the person using it knows there's a lot of truth to what the other person is saying but they refuse to acknowledge it for whatever emotional reasons).

Re: My experience with WPEngine

#163

Post by mrviking »

dotBen wrote: post #97

Ben, one of the co-founders of WP Engine here and as someone wrote below[1] - yes, this isn't the most wonderful thing to wake up to in the morning and sort out while still in your PJ's ;) Ok, so first and foremost I am incredibly sorry, Jacques, for the experience you had. I can say with confidence that your experience with WP Engine is out of the ordinary, but no excuses. I’m writing this as a way of owning up to m…

We are hosting our blog on WPEngine and you guys increased the response speed of our blog a lot compared to other hosting providers! We used to spend hours maintaining the blog and make sure it runs reliably, and deploying a new version used to be scary in the absence of a checkpoint mechanism, but you guys solved this problem well.

I can understand that the customer is frustrated with having to change his code to move from a VPS environment to a cloud environment, but that is the unfortunate truth when scaling. Either you 1) get closer to the real hardware and throw resources at it (more ram, vps, or dedicated machine) or 2) change your code to be horizontally scalable on light cloud instances.

Maybe this is chance to create a help-page that explains to users what resource limits they should stay below (memory, cpu, queries) to handle peaks in traffic and how to identify problem points (bad SQL queries, hungry plugins).

Re: My experience with WPEngine

#164

Post by davesims »

smacktoward wrote: post #124
dotBen wrote: post #97

Ben, one of the co-founders of WP Engine here and as someone wrote below[1] - yes, this isn't the most wonderful thing to wake up to in the morning and sort out while still in your PJ's ;) Ok, so first and foremost I am incredibly sorry, Jacques, for the experience you had. I can say with confidence that your experience with WP Engine is out of the ordinary, but no excuses. I’m writing this as a way of owning up to m…

One of the reasons that your site experienced problems was that there were some aspects of the site development that simply didn't scale. Like any scale-orientated PaaS, we can provide the infrastructure to enable you to scale but your code needs to work in partnership to fully achieve that. As Sean, my head SysAdmin wrote on a ticket to you, some of your pages were performing a sort on 188590 rows in memory each tim…

"From a customer service perspective, this comment leaves a really bad taste in my mouth.

You guys say right on your home page that you're "infinitely scalable." [...] The (strong) implication being that any WordPress configuration will perform better on WPEngine than on an alternative hosting platform."

I agree with your general point that, from the standpoint of the entrepreneur, "the customer is always right" should be words to live by. On the other hand, in the paas industry, it should be axiomatic, i.e., understood by all competent parties, that horizontal scaling (the "infinitely scalable" bit) manifestly will NOT address problematic architectures, n+1 queries, full table scans, poorly/non-indexed schemas, etc.

This, to me, is not blaming the customer, it's laying out in reasonable terms assumptions any competent developer or software entrepreneur should understand long before they employ a paas.

Your larger point, though, is valid: even after bracketing the given assumptions of what the responsibility of a paas truly is, better communication up front could temper expectations as to what "infinitely scalable" (a bold phrase, to be sure) really means to the individual customer. It doesn't mean a paas can fix a application that locks the datbase for a full second per query, etc. It does likely mean (I'm assuming here, I have no experience with WPEngine) spinning up new instances and handling increased loads should be Heroku-simple.

In this case, I think WPEngine is taking the hit for what they should (bad communication on the support side) and explaining in real terms what paas's can and can't do. There's a difference between "blaming the customer" and simply being honest about what the bottom-line issue is. NOT addressing this side of it may have long-term implications if another customer comes along with similar expectations. Being clear about what the client's responsibility is doesn't necessarily equate to "blame."

Re: My experience with WPEngine

#165

Post by dotBen »

dotBen wrote: post #104
ck2 wrote: post #42

WPEngine uses NFS/NAS which is a show-stopper. Dreamhost has the same issue, and GoDaddy (still?) You never, ever, use NFS on something with hundreds of files to load for every page (ie. WordPress). Every file takes 2-2.5ms to stat/load on NFS ( from my tests on WPengine ) which seems small but adds up fast. It means you instantly have 700ms or more of overhead on the SERVER side to render a page (not transmit to the…

There's a fair amount of criticism flying around about us on this thread, but that's one I can't make any apologies over. There's all sorts of interesting things we're doing with NFS, along with caching layers, that ensure this is never a bottleneck -- and even provides benefits in other ways.

Also, to add, most customers actually don't run via NAS - we have /nas/ in the paths for other historical reasons.

Re: My experience with WPEngine

#166

Post by tedchs »

As my two cents, although I am a Linux engineer, I don't want to manage a Web cluster just for Wordpress, so I use WPEngine in production for about 10 sites and it has worked very well and support has been sufficiently responsive.

Reading about this, I get concerned when people conflate "performance" and "scalability". Performance is about time-based metrics such a requests-per-second. Scalability is about the question of whether I can add more hardware proportionately to my request load and continue to perform. WPEngine's marketing claims are about scalability, not performance.

This guy's WPEngine code was apparently doing a 189k row sort when serving certain requests, which is not going to perform well on any hosting platform, including DIY.

Re: My experience with WPEngine

#167

Post by typicalrunt »

ohashi wrote: post #134
typicalrunt wrote: post #83

WordPress, like most LAMP apps of its era, makes a series of architectural assumptions that turn out to have horrible impact on non-functional qualities … but that’s another rant for another day. Until I came to this sentence, I was coming to the conclusion that CMSes fall down fairly quickly once you add in large data, large traffic, or complex installs. For the life of me, I can't see why people continue to use CMS…

What doesn't make sense about it? I can see a lot of scenarios where you start with a CMS because it does a good job of doing what you need. Why reinvent the wheel? Scaling issues is going to occur in all code, even code you write and know inside and out. It just means you become entirely responsible for debugging and re-architecting to improve its performance. @Drupal specific comment, you could easily throw nginx a…

Valid point. What I keyed on in the article is that it is a complex install, and that tells me that maybe his CMS is working against him. In those cases I like to remove the impediment and simplify the data model (which should simplify the code).

Re: My experience with WPEngine

#168

Post by aoe »

jacques_chester wrote: post #126
MattRogish wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Partition? Why won't a simple DBMS index help?

From memory, the relevant fields are already indexed.

I'm guessing the recent comments widget is just doing an ORDER BY date DESC LIMIT 10 or something? With an index on date, I don't see how this could be slow.

How long does the query take?

How many rows do you have?

Re: My experience with WPEngine

#169

Post by jessedhillon »

grey-area wrote: post #137
ryanwaggoner wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, he's basically brushing the OP and everyone in this thread off as being hatful and bitter, and not really worth interacting with. It's incredibly dismissive, especially since multiple people in this thread (myself included) have mentioned that they've had issues and are or were paying customers . I'll grant you that "ridiculing" is probably not the right word...maybe dismissive or condescending would have been mo…

I'm not convinced a public forum is the best place for customer support - witness Ben's very reasonable statement above which is still accruing negative responses, in spite of going well beyond the call of duty in refunding money paid to a completely different service . It's quite hard to interact with a crowd baying for blood - emotions run high, and people tend to pick sides and pick holes in any argument. One resp…

I'm not convinced a public forum is the best place for customer support ...

I think a great heuristic here is this: your customers can be publicly negative, but you cannot.

If you publicly flame a customer then, no matter how deserving the customer was, some future potential customers will look at that and say "That could be me." Most businesses, I think, can't afford to risk that.

There are some notable counterexamples, in my opinion they are the exceptions which prove the rule, i.e. when the business wants to fire the customer and make an example of him/her for others.

The best example of this is the Drafthouse movie theater in Austin, who created a great PSA wherein they ridicule a customer for insisting she had the right to use her cell phone during a movie: http://adland.tv/content/drafthouse-movie-theatre-makes-keep...

Re: My experience with WPEngine

#170

Post by davesims »

ryanwaggoner wrote: post #112
dotBen wrote: post #97

Ben, one of the co-founders of WP Engine here and as someone wrote below[1] - yes, this isn't the most wonderful thing to wake up to in the morning and sort out while still in your PJ's ;) Ok, so first and foremost I am incredibly sorry, Jacques, for the experience you had. I can say with confidence that your experience with WP Engine is out of the ordinary, but no excuses. I’m writing this as a way of owning up to m…

While you're looking into this, you really need to jump on your cofounder Jason, who is currently making a complete ass of himself (and WPEngine) with bullshit like this: https://twitter.com/asmartbear/status/261103840231825409 https://twitter.com/asmartbear/status/261103530855784448 Ben, I really appreciate you taking the time to post this here and demonstrate that you take this seriously, but your cofounder is curr…

"Completely disgusting" is taking it a bit far, but it's certainly puzzling, as is the irrational potshot at HN -- a hub of potential customers! "Disgusting"? No. "Bizarre", especially for the man behind A Smart Bear?? Yes.
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