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Performance of WordPress Hosting Companies Compared

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Re: Performance of WordPress Hosting Companies Compared

#11

Post by jacques_chester »

xaritas wrote: post #8
jacques_chester wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 reasonin…

Reasonable point, insofar as it's unlike that comments will ever be joined with unrelated articles.

The main reason you'd get failures in a flat file system would be the normal reasons you get a relational database in the first place. Either you get update anomalies, or you want to compact the data into single atoms, or you want ad hoc querying rather than a specific pattern of access set in advance.

It doesn't help that until 5.6 MySQL's query planner joined on disk if you tried to join any two tables in which one or both has a TEXT field, regardless of engine and regardless of the actual fields selected.

As you can imagine, this slows things down a bit, considering that's the core join performed for single post generation. It also makes every kind of "recent comments" plugin a performance nightmare (quite aside from their cache-busting power).

Re: Performance of WordPress Hosting Companies Compared

#12

Post by tibbon »

jacques_chester wrote: post #4
tibbon wrote: 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).

Then all you should need at most is a single query to a single table- which could be loaded asynchronously via Ajax for swift loading time and less load on the server (no slow view renders) and that response could be cached with Nginx/Varnish, and further cached on the backend with Redis. I've seen WP sites that I had to debug/fix with 200+ queries per page. That should never happen.

Re: Performance of WordPress Hosting Companies Compared

#15

Post by jacques_chester »

tibbon wrote: post #12
jacques_chester wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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).

Then all you should need at most is a single query to a single table- which could be loaded asynchronously via Ajax for swift loading time and less load on the server (no slow view renders) and that response could be cached with Nginx/Varnish, and further cached on the backend with Redis. I've seen WP sites that I had to debug/fix with 200+ queries per page. That should never happen.

> Then all you should need at most is a single query to a single table

Wordpress divides posts + comments into 4 tables.

> which could be loaded asynchronously via Ajax for swift loading time and less load on the server (no slow view renders)

Wordpress can't assume any particular PHP + webserver configuration. Sometimes they're configured to send while rendering, sometimes the whole process blocks until it runs to completion. Ajax doesn't magically change that.

I also dislike the idea that I should need to download what is a small application to assemble a document ... when I could just download the document straight up.

When page loads get too long, I switch on pagination.

> cached with Nginx/Varnish, and further cached on the backend with Redis

My own setup is memcache for working objects. WP-supercache is configured to write gzip'd pages to disk and nginx is configured to serve .gz versions of page directly from disk whenever they're found. The OS file cache does the rest.

> I've seen WP sites that I had to debug/fix with 200+ queries per page.

When you see hundreds of queries per page, check your plugins and widgets. Wordpress is not my favourite software by any measure, but out of the box it's not that dumb.

Re: Performance of WordPress Hosting Companies Compared

#16

Post by tibbon »

minimaxir wrote: post #5
tibbon wrote: 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.

And I don't understand Wordpress as a CMS. It's frankly a terrible one as well. Poor internationalization support, doesn't meet government accessibility requirements, its non-structure makes maintenance and teamwork almost impossible, its plugin structure is a landmind, terrible (no) dependency management, encourages deployment via FTP, and a terrible security model.

I'm not a Python guy, but Plone kicks its ass in pretty much every way as a CMS.

Wordpress can't seem to choose what they are- and they fail miserable from a technical perspective (yes, I know they have a huge market share, but I'm not one to believe that the markets actually pick the best option. McDonalds burgers are not the height of cuisine).

Re: Performance of WordPress Hosting Companies Compared

#17

Post by ryandonsullivan »

uladzislau wrote: post #13

No uptime mentioned? The common issue with shared hosting providers is frequent downtime.

For this particular article I didn't record any uptime. It's definitely a metric worth measuring, but I wanted to get super specific with this test. Lots more testing to come :)

Re: Performance of WordPress Hosting Companies Compared

#18

Post by ryandonsullivan »

jacques_chester wrote: post #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 lun…

Yep. These are all great points. This is the first set of many many tests to come but it was good to get a baseline. If you check the timestamps of the full tests, you'll see that all of them were run back to back to back within the course of about 2 hours total time, so there shouldn't be much variation. That said, locking down ALL of the potential variables is definitely something I'm striving for long term.

Re: Performance of WordPress Hosting Companies Compared

#19

Post by unknownian »

jacques_chester wrote: post #4
tibbon wrote: 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).

This is exactly it for me as well. I'd use Jekyll/Pelican again if comments were somehow built-in. Disqus is still a good service for those who need it.

Re: Performance of WordPress Hosting Companies Compared

#20

Post by bdclimber14 »

ryandonsullivan wrote: post #18
jacques_chester wrote: post #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 lun…

Yep. These are all great points. This is the first set of many many tests to come but it was good to get a baseline. If you check the timestamps of the full tests, you'll see that all of them were run back to back to back within the course of about 2 hours total time, so there shouldn't be much variation. That said, locking down ALL of the potential variables is definitely something I'm striving for long term.

Hi Ryan, my name is Sean. I'm the GoDaddy product manager in charge of WordPress hosting. Thanks for including us and I'm glad we could surprise you with some fast speeds. In the past few months we've really made some huge strides in reducing page load times and are at some impressive speeds across the board right now. However, seeing your response times fall off a cliff surprised us too. There's been a big email thread going on this weekend to nail down exactly what happened so we can fix it :) I'd love to talk more and share some of the details around a new WordPress experience we're delivering in a few months. My email is in my HN profile.
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