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Performance of WordPress Hosting Companies Compared

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Re: Performance of WordPress Hosting Companies Compared

#2
I really don't understand Wordpress as a blog platform sometimes. Why so many database queries? Why even have database queries at all- aside from perhaps comments? Static pages make significantly more sense for almost all blog setups (Octopress ftw). Making a blog handle this amount of traffic should be trivial, but Wordpress itself is often an issue.

Re: Performance of WordPress Hosting Companies Compared

#3
More useful than minima and maxima by themselves would be an mean and standard deviation.

It's more useful to know how the sites perform most of the time.

I'd also have been interested to know if tests were controlled for time of day. For example, the sites I host are almost all Australian and so the traffic I see follows a 12-hour wave as daylight crosses the continent from East to West, with small peaks around lunch time and after dinner.

Re: Performance of WordPress Hosting Companies Compared

#4
post #2

I really don't understand Wordpress as a blog platform sometimes. Why so many database queries? Why even have database queries at all- aside from perhaps comments? Static pages make significantly more sense for almost all blog setups (Octopress ftw). Making a blog handle this amount of traffic should be trivial, but Wordpress itself is often an issue.

> Why even have database queries at all- aside from perhaps comments?

Comments are non-negotiable features for many bloggers. 3rd party javascript is not the same in the eyes of many (including my little network).

Re: Performance of WordPress Hosting Companies Compared

#5
post #2

I really don't understand Wordpress as a blog platform sometimes. Why so many database queries? Why even have database queries at all- aside from perhaps comments? Static pages make significantly more sense for almost all blog setups (Octopress ftw). Making a blog handle this amount of traffic should be trivial, but Wordpress itself is often an issue.

Database features are important for the CMS aspects of Wordpress, not just the blogging aspects.

Although Wordpress crashing under load is what caused me to switch to Octopress.

Re: Performance of WordPress Hosting Companies Compared

#6
post #2

I really don't understand Wordpress as a blog platform sometimes. Why so many database queries? Why even have database queries at all- aside from perhaps comments? Static pages make significantly more sense for almost all blog setups (Octopress ftw). Making a blog handle this amount of traffic should be trivial, but Wordpress itself is often an issue.

> Why even have database queries at all- aside from perhaps comments? Comments are non-negotiable features for many bloggers. 3rd party javascript is not the same in the eyes of many (including my little network).

[deleted]

Re: Performance of WordPress Hosting Companies Compared

#7
post #2

I really don't understand Wordpress as a blog platform sometimes. Why so many database queries? Why even have database queries at all- aside from perhaps comments? Static pages make significantly more sense for almost all blog setups (Octopress ftw). Making a blog handle this amount of traffic should be trivial, but Wordpress itself is often an issue.

Database features are important for the CMS aspects of Wordpress, not just the blogging aspects. Although Wordpress crashing under load is what caused me to switch to Octopress.

>Although Wordpress crashing under load is what caused me to switch to Octopress.

It's all about the caching plugins. I had my blog hit 300k visits in the span of 8 hours, peaking at about 100 visits per second on a shared web host. Utilizing cashing plugins means every single person that visited my blog was served static content that refreshed itself every 10 minutes.

Re: Performance of WordPress Hosting Companies Compared

#8
post #2

I really don't understand Wordpress as a blog platform sometimes. Why so many database queries? Why even have database queries at all- aside from perhaps comments? Static pages make significantly more sense for almost all blog setups (Octopress ftw). Making a blog handle this amount of traffic should be trivial, but Wordpress itself is often an issue.

> Why even have database queries at all- aside from perhaps comments? Comments are non-negotiable features for many bloggers. 3rd party javascript is not the same in the eyes of many (including my little network).

Unless things have changed dramatically recently, Hacker News uses the file system to store comments (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5229522) and it seems to work well. I can imagine a few cases where having your comments in a DBMS would be a requirement, but none of them seem applicable to situations where WordPress where one might want to use WordPress anyway.

Of course, this is guess from a priori reasoning. I would be genuinely interested if somebody tried file-based comments for a WordPress (or a similar platform) based site and it fell over or failed in some way.

Re: Performance of WordPress Hosting Companies Compared

#9
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Database features are important for the CMS aspects of Wordpress, not just the blogging aspects. Although Wordpress crashing under load is what caused me to switch to Octopress.

>Although Wordpress crashing under load is what caused me to switch to Octopress. It's all about the caching plugins. I had my blog hit 300k visits in the span of 8 hours, peaking at about 100 visits per second on a shared web host. Utilizing cashing plugins means every single person that visited my blog was served static content that refreshed itself every 10 minutes.

My Wordpress blog on Dreamhost shared hosting w/ WP Super Cache and Cloudflare could easily handle 100 visits/second.

200 visits/second caused blank pages half the time.

300 visits/second? Boom.

Re: Performance of WordPress Hosting Companies Compared

#10
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Although Wordpress crashing under load is what caused me to switch to Octopress. It's all about the caching plugins. I had my blog hit 300k visits in the span of 8 hours, peaking at about 100 visits per second on a shared web host. Utilizing cashing plugins means every single person that visited my blog was served static content that refreshed itself every 10 minutes.

My Wordpress blog on Dreamhost shared hosting w/ WP Super Cache and Cloudflare could easily handle 100 visits/second. 200 visits/second caused blank pages half the time. 300 visits/second? Boom.

I've never used WP Super Cache so I can't comment there, but having used W3 Total Cache I can say that the performance I get with W3 Total Cache is exactly the same as when I tried out Jekyll/Octopress since both solutions are only serving static HTML files and nothing else.

Then again, 300 visits per second, estimating 250KB for the entire page (css, js, images, etc) is about 75Mbps which is going to be a lot to ask from any shared hosting provider.

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