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Performance of WordPress Hosting Companies Compared

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Re: Performance of WordPress Hosting Companies Compared

#31

Post by pixie_ »

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.

Wordpress kind of makes me realize how incredible PHP is. It's a 'program of pages.' Which can basically hot swap update itself as it runs. You can download plug-ins in the control panel and extend the functionality of your site instantly. I still get mixed up trying to wrap my head around it even after 15 years of using it. It's a program that exists in different files that can be updated individually while the program itself is used. Most of the 'state' is temporary or stored in dedicated memcaches or databases. It makes you wonder what if other applications were written in a PHP style structure - what would that be like?

Re: Performance of WordPress Hosting Companies Compared

#32

Post by wslh »

smacktoward wrote: post #22
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.

You need to understand a little history to understand why WordPress is where it is today. The first blog software to get really popular was Movable Type ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Movable_Type ). MT was basically a set of Perl scripts that provided a nice GUI backend to manage content stored in a database. But the actual public-facing sites it created were all static files. When you hit "Publish," it would scan o…

I would say that the plugin offerings is key to its success. Even if I often criticize my wordpress installation I prefer to install a plugin in one click than spend a lot of time at the html/css/js level.

Beyond that I couldn't understand their product feature priorities: no headings in their wysiwyg editor, no good themes. I was looking to something like http://om.co which is wordpress but using commercial themes not available for the general public.

Re: Performance of WordPress Hosting Companies Compared

#33

Post by grey-area »

tibbon wrote: post #16
minimaxir wrote: post #5

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.

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 p…

Like McDonalds, it succeeds because it's the easiest, cheapest option which is good enough (not good, but good enough).

Re: Performance of WordPress Hosting Companies Compared

#34

Post by jacques_chester »

pixie_ wrote: post #31
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.

Wordpress kind of makes me realize how incredible PHP is. It's a 'program of pages.' Which can basically hot swap update itself as it runs. You can download plug-ins in the control panel and extend the functionality of your site instantly. I still get mixed up trying to wrap my head around it even after 15 years of using it. It's a program that exists in different files that can be updated individually while the prog…

PHP succeeded in part over mod_perl because of the very statelessness you describe. State is delegated to a database or a memory caching service; each request is answered from scratch.

mod_perl allowed programmers to sink their application code deep into the guts of Apache. In retrospect, this turned out to be a dead-end because it is difficult to install, difficult to update and difficult to scale up.

PHP's lack of power and low cost of operation ("here's your FTP account, have fun") made it much more attractive to shared hosts.

In short, operational advantages outweighed programming advantages.

Re: Performance of WordPress Hosting Companies Compared

#35

Post by jacques_chester »

ryandonsullivan wrote: post #23
RKearney wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Another thing to look at is using nginx as a web server. It's a lot more lightweight than Apache. Paired with a solid SSD drive and varnish caching, and you can get some really great performance out of WordPress.

I've seen Varnish choke on mainline code: the Recent Comments widget, which can invalidate an entire site whenever a comment is posted anywhere. I have one site which caused both WPEngine and Page.ly to lock up on just 30k views/day because of that.

What I do with my VPS:

1. WP Supercache is configured to write .html.gz copies to disk.

2. Nginx is configured to check if such a file exists before referring anything to PHP. If it finds the .html.gz, it will serve it directly from disk. Ordinary file caching gives it the advantages Varnish promises.

3. WP Supercache appears to correctly handle invalidation when a new comment is posted.

Re: Performance of WordPress Hosting Companies Compared

#36

Post by teddyh »

pixie_ wrote: post #31
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.

Wordpress kind of makes me realize how incredible PHP is. It's a 'program of pages.' Which can basically hot swap update itself as it runs. You can download plug-ins in the control panel and extend the functionality of your site instantly. I still get mixed up trying to wrap my head around it even after 15 years of using it. It's a program that exists in different files that can be updated individually while the prog…

That would be a Lisp Machine or a Smalltalk environment.

Re: Performance of WordPress Hosting Companies Compared

#37

Post by bdclimber14 »

jacques_chester wrote: post #26
bdclimber14 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 thr…

Check what kind of traffic you are seeing on /xmlrpc.php. What tends to happen is that spammers hit that file up and ask it to perform slow operations (the Wordpress team recently greatly expanded its capabilities). A PHP instance gets tied up for the duration. I've had instances lock up until killed by timeouts of 2 minutes. When a bunch of traffic arrives at once, it only takes a handful of badly behaved instances…

Thanks for the tip. After reviewing Ryan's logs, it turns out a software security layer, Sentinel, was detecting the load test as a DoS attack since LoadImpact was sending all traffic from a single IP.

Re: Performance of WordPress Hosting Companies Compared

#38

Post by CurtMonash »

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.

Features like category lists are implemented via database queries. There's little wrong with that; what's wrong is that small result sets can't easily be pinned in memory.

As with website software, cache performance probably has a great deal to do with how WordPress performs.

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