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My experience with WPEngine

chester.id.au

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Re: My experience with WPEngine

#181

Post by mnicole »

grey-area wrote: post #122
ryanwaggoner wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't see what you think is disgusting about these tweets, they express a personal opinion, here they are in case they are deleted: @billmcneely yup, there's always someone bitter and hateful. Sometimes they even have a point, but choose to make it in a destructive way. @P_Doubleya @gozmike thanks guys. That's also why I ignore HN. There's always haters. That's not ridiculing customers, and it's not disgusting or d…

It's totally disrespectful. To act as if a crowd of savvy users who run their own services aren't to be taken seriously and that a single user - who tried for weeks to get help based off of the company's own claims - is this loudmouth minority? That's completely ignorant and rude.

I actively ignore Twitter for the same reasons some might avoid HN, but that doesn't mean that there aren't valid and intelligent conversations to be had there, particularly if you have to deal with customer service and PR.

Re: My experience with WPEngine

#182

Post by javajosh »

jacques_chester wrote: post #89
stevenkovar wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems a bit distasteful to publicly attack a popular service, then try to siphon the traffic their name generates to your "bloggers."

I suppose that's one way of looking at it. But what I said is true. It's a shame that out of all the things that every site on Ozblogistan has ever posted, this is the one that made the HN front page. There are far better posts than mine in those blogs. Is it wrong for me to be proud of them?

But now you are posting off-topic comments to that sensationalist post. This does harm to your credibility as a complaining customer, frankly, because now it seems you have an ulterior motive for complaining so loudly.

Personally, I downvoted the comment and suggest you delete it.

Re: My experience with WPEngine

#183

Post by druiid »

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…

Doesn't even have to be static to put nginx in front of it! As long as you can set proper cache headers from your script (in this case Drupal, and I imagine it does), you can cache even dynamic-ish sites quite well!

Re: My experience with WPEngine

#184

Post by papsosouid »

csomar wrote: post #175
papsosouid wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>As a seasoned WordPress developer You realize that puts your credibility in the negatives right? Wordpress is infamous for being one of the worst pieces of software ever created. The fact that your software is terrible does not mean a company whose sole purpose is to be experts at making that terrible software run is doing good by failing to make it run.

I don't understand the correlation between the two. From your perspective, since the financial market is terrible, all people working on finance are terrible. WordPress is a bad piece of software. But there is a lot of money there, and you'll find lots of smart people working on it.

I don't understand how you can not understand. You are in part responsible for this terrible software. Which is horribly bloated and inefficient and runs like crap. So it is in your best interests to try to pretend anyone who has a terrible experience with it is "doing something unusual and different". The reality is we're talking about a setup that is about as simple as wordpress can be. The fact that "as simple as wordpress can be" is an insanely complex monstrosity doesn't let people who said "we can handle your complex wordpress installs no problem" off the hook.

Re: My experience with WPEngine

#185

Post by papsosouid »

webwright wrote: post #176
papsosouid wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>As a seasoned WordPress developer You realize that puts your credibility in the negatives right? Wordpress is infamous for being one of the worst pieces of software ever created. The fact that your software is terrible does not mean a company whose sole purpose is to be experts at making that terrible software run is doing good by failing to make it run.

Yeah, WordPress powers (by some estimations) 18-20% of the freakin' Internet. It's not flawless, but it's a great piece of software that makes millions of people (and developers) happy.

"It is popular" does not in any way contradict my statement which was "it is a pile of shit". Internet explorer used to "power the internet" too. It was also a colossal pile of shit.

Re: My experience with WPEngine

#186

Post by MattRogish »

ashray wrote: post #161
jacques_chester wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I think it may be this "widget" (I don't know the WP ecosystem, but this seems reasonable): http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/recent-comments-widget-w...

I only see one query in there: $comments = $wpdb->get_results("SELECT $wpdb->comments.* FROM $wpdb->comments JOIN $wpdb->posts ON $wpdb->posts.ID = $wpdb->comments.comment_post_ID WHERE comment_approved = '1' AND post_status = 'publish' ORDER BY comment_date_gmt DESC LIMIT 150");

I'm not sure why they are fetching 150 (why would you use that many?) but this query could be slow if you have many posts and many comments. Also, the goofy thing is that they are wiping out the cache every time and regenerating it instead of (say) incrementally adding to it.

I'd re-write it with an exists, which may help performance instead of a join (I've seen MySQL be pretty dumb with joins when you basically want an exists):

SELECT whatever FROM comments WHERE EXISTS( SELECT * FROM posts WHERE ... ) AND comment_approved = 1 ORDER BY LIMIT xx

In this case, MySQL may be having a problem where it can't read a multi-column index on post_id and comment_date_gmt DESC (I'm not sure if you can specify ordering in MySQL indexes, been a while), thus it's basically doing an in-memory sort of every approved comment (on a published post, which is likely all of them) in the system, which in his case was about ~200K. This could definitely take several seconds if there isn't enough memory to do it all at once (lots of swapping).

Personally, I'd try and modify the logic to be more conducive to indexing - do you really care if a comment was on a post that you made 10 years ago? MySQL also (IIRC) doesn't have bitmap indexes, so that "comment_approved" thing may or may not invalidate an index usage unless you add it to the index.

I'd probably do something like: the "n" (where n is < 150) most recent comments to a post made within the last n number of days, so you can really cut down on the number of rows you need to sort.

Re: My experience with WPEngine

#187

Post by papsosouid »

justinph wrote: post #144
papsosouid wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>As a seasoned WordPress developer You realize that puts your credibility in the negatives right? Wordpress is infamous for being one of the worst pieces of software ever created. The fact that your software is terrible does not mean a company whose sole purpose is to be experts at making that terrible software run is doing good by failing to make it run.

Puh-leeze. Everyone thinks some other software is terrible. Wordpress might have some funky bits, but a) it's gotten a lot better over the years, b) it's pretty damn popular, and c) end users don't care if the guts suck if the UI works and it does the job. Get over yourself.

Did you have a point to make? Shitty software being popular doesn't make the authors of that shitty software any less biased when discussing that shitty software.

Re: My experience with WPEngine

#188

Post by rjbond3rd »

TallboyOne wrote: post #150
dotBen wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The (strong) implication being that any WordPress configuration will perform better on WPEngine than on an alternative hosting platform." No, there's no inference or implication that any (ie regardless of how its built) WordPress configuration will scale on WP Engine. As I wrote in my prior comment, scalability is a partnership between infrastructure and code. That's the case irregardless of framework and PaaS provi…

I don't mean to derail the conversation, but irregardless isn't a word.

It's a popular word in Boston.

Re: My experience with WPEngine

#189

Post by scribu »

druiid wrote: post #141

This story and comments have been flogged to death a bit already, but I do have a couple questions/concerns here. While perhaps the issue ended up mostly being due to a Wordpress core issue, I question why this was an issue for a service that someone is expected to pay $250/month for? The OP was able to, without a team of engineers/admins get the same content running on a VPS with no issue. I then question exactly wh…

That's a very good question.

Re: My experience with WPEngine

#190

Post by cocoflunchy »

dotBen wrote: post #136
smacktoward wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"The (strong) implication being that any WordPress configuration will perform better on WPEngine than on an alternative hosting platform." No, there's no inference or implication that any (ie regardless of how its built) WordPress configuration will scale on WP Engine. As I wrote in my prior comment, scalability is a partnership between infrastructure and code. That's the case irregardless of framework and PaaS provi…

We like car analogies at WP Engine - if I sell you a racing car and you're only a moderately good driver then you're going to crash when you approach the corner at 200mph. There's little I can do about that other than teach you to drive, and I'm in the business of building the cars. There are plenty of folks who can help you improve your race-craft out there.

The way I see it, you are not selling the car, but providing a driver so that I don't have to worry about how it should be driven.

I should sit in the back and relax while you make sure that my car is driving safely and comfortably.

Maybe your message isn't clear enough if you think that your product is the car. From your website:

QUIT WORRYING AND LET US RUN WORDPRESS FOR YOU

I read:

QUIT WORRYING AND LET US DRIVE YOU CAR FOR YOU

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