Earlier quoted context omitted.
That could very likely be the "Recent Comments" feature, which is incredibly inefficient.
This is basically what I found with some preliminary detective work from Page.ly.
Wow!
My experience with WPEngine
241–250 of 250 posts
Re: My experience with WPEngine
#242Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, it's your business, and advice on the Internet is worth as much as you paid for it. So don't worry, I don't take it personally if you disagree. That being said... No, there's no inference or implication that any WordPress configuration will scale on WP Engine. I would humbly suggest that your entire Web site is a refutation of this assertion. Even moving beyond the copy on the home page to the fine-print "Commo…
This is silly, infinite scaling doesn't mean "I can do whatever I want and it better work". Use some common sense.
This comment sounds like one of those BS ISP ads where they promote "Unlimited" serviece but it's not unlimited bandwidth only an "Unlimited" connection. Or how about the cell phone providers offering "Unlimited" data where there's a star at the end and it states that you'll be throttled after 5 GB.
You have to understand the layperson won't know anything about tables etc and stating "infinitely scale" is a HUGE selling point for potential customers. If they wanted to be truthful they wouldn't say that, or they would say we CAN provide infinite scaling IF the following conditions are met.
Re: My experience with WPEngine
#243For all who are thinking about moving to WPEngine: Your staging server does not use WPE's caching technology, which your production server will use. WPE will not give you details on how their secret-sauce caching works. This means that things that work on staging will break on production. WPE also refuse to turn off their caching on production, but also refuse to turn ON their caching on your staging server. This mea…
So we don't apply the caching stuff to the staging server because the purpose of the staging server is to stage content and test new plugins and themes. We invented this feature in response to bloggers and site owners who wanted to be able to test a new plugin before adding it to the live/production version of their site. We're also the only managed WP platform to offer such a feature as standard with all accounts. I…
This is not true for App Engine. You can create a "staging" version of your app and access it at staging.my-app.appspot.com. It all runs on the same infrastructure that your main version runs on, and it's easy enough to make it admin-only. Once your satisfied that it's safe to deploy, it's two clicks to change which version is serving.
You may be the only managed Wordpress platform to do so, but App Engine has had this functionality for a long time.
Re: My experience with WPEngine
#244Earlier quoted context omitted.
I recently removed some code that stat'd 4000 files over NFS. It took ~5 seconds, so it wasn't as bad as you say. Also, I'm pretty sure NFS can do better if you tune it.
Well obviously every NFS setup is going to perform differently. I personally benchmarked WPengine which is how I got the 2.5ms number. What you are saying is 1.25ms on your network (5000/4000). That's twice as fast but still significant.
Yes, I agree..
Found this [1], which might be helpful. The linked python program shows really high numbers for me though. Hopefully it's incorrect or I just misunderstand what the numbers mean.
Re: My experience with WPEngine
#245I want a two word tl;dr summary of every article in the title: How fast is... Apple.com? (tl;dr: not very); Wired's Review of the Microsoft Surface (tl;dr: pretty interesting).
I sincerely doubt many reasonably interesting articles can be accurately summed up in two words.
I was only being semi-serious but there are certainly a good many titles that could be written in an ambiguous manner.
The original author may want to use that title but that's not to say the person who posts it to HN has to.
Re: My experience with WPEngine
#246Earlier quoted context omitted.
Jason, what's up with this comment? Where did you find this 'complex edge case of a system' in his post? This 'unique setup'? Why do you think 'impossible things were about to become' when he was able to easily move the sites to WP Engine... after paying a 3rd party to do it? He didn't describe a single special requirement that I can see. Just plain old WordPress with some existing data to move. Not even a large netw…
Do you not read the part about him having over 400k comments? Don't you think that is a bit outside the regular scope?
I don't think that was in the post originally. Either way, it's not outside scope, it's not a big deal, and it's not an excuse for weeks of failing to provide support. They didn't fail to even move the site because of the number of comments. Matt Mullenweg, the founder of WordPress, commented himself that they host many blogs with far more comments than that without issue.
Re: My experience with WPEngine
#247Earlier quoted context omitted.
I sincerely doubt many reasonably interesting articles can be accurately summed up in two words.
I was only being semi-serious but there are certainly a good many titles that could be written in an ambiguous manner. The original author may want to use that title but that's not to say the person who posts it to HN has to.
could be written in a LESS ambiguous manner...
Oops.
Re: My experience with WPEngine
#248Ben, 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…
Thanks, Ben. FYI, the problem is with the Recent Comments widget code that ships in the Wordpress base install. Page.ly had the same database connection dropping issues you did and I presume for the same reason. (edit: By the way, use the db-error.php facility to put up nicer error pages. It's also a really obvious point to insert some monitoring logic -- I think customers would like it if you noticed their problems…
I agree that this is mainline code. I have a couple of multisite instances and I allow no plugins beyond Akismet purely to make upgrades and performance a no-brainer.
Yet in my pinboard I have this bookmarked: http://pento.net/2011/04/28/partitioning-the-wordpress-comme...
Yup, I had to partition the comments table.
I've been watching this too: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/postgresql-for-wordpress...
I'm willing to accept fractionally slower page loads, as for the most part they're cached heavily post-generation. I'd feel far more comfortable partitioning in Postgres not least because I'm far more familiar with it.
Re: My experience with WPEngine
#249Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was helping a friend debug something on WPEngine. We learned that the caching doesn't allow you to set cookies it would seem (from PHP). Had to do it all using JS instead. I thought I was going crazy trying to debug the code when it was definitely an issue with the way they cache. Not saying it was right or wrong, it just wasn't a fun experience thinking I was going crazy. And hopefully if anyone else is trying SET…
That was my issue, and yes, it absolutely is one of the many reasons why staging instances should have a caching on/off switch that mirrors production. It is absolutely 100% feasible that WPEngine's caching will break your site, and you need to know this before you push to production. Don't get me wrong, as a contractor to a company that uses WPEngine, we have had a great experience with it - but e.g. in the case of…
It sounds like you and ohashi don't understand how caching works. WP caching serves up static copies of your pages, bypassing the code and DB calls that would normally be required. Since your code is bypassed cookies won't be set.
This isn't something specific to WPEngine, this is how all the good WP caching plugins work.
Re: My experience with WPEngine
#250I'm curious for a side-by-side comparison of your linode vs the wpengine host: cpu, ram, etc. If you can perform the comment sort in memory without hassle, what is is about the size of RAM provisioned by wpengine that makes this impossible? My opinion, but for for $3000 per year, you should have been provisioned with as much ram as a linode VPS.
I was curious about the too. In case you missed it up-thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4695810 two 512mb linodes, one for nginx/php, one for mysql.
Thanks for that!