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Friday, April 28th, 2006Friday, April 28th, 2006

WordPress Is NOT Scaleable

by Shawn @ 1:21 pm · filed under Server Admin, Blogs

The core of WordPress (this blog software) is pretty much a piece of crap as far as it's "guts" are concerned (although I knew this already, I just didn't care because my blog doesn't get enough visitors to really make that fact matter much).

Anyway, I woke up this morning to my servers being thrashed (database server was hitting it's max limit of 2,500 concurrent connections). Turns out it was because of a front-page Digg (the 3rd one for digitalpoint.com in the last 60 days, but the 1st one for my blog with the crappy WordPress backend). That didn't hold up to the "digg effect" for very long.

I ended up cobbling together a caching mechanism for WordPress real quick that actually made everything okay, but what I really want to know is if anyone knows of any blog software out there that doesn't have a crap backend? One that can hold up under load if need be. Sure would be nice if there is one out there already so I don't have to do it myself.

This is the digg in case anyone is curious. It was dugg by the same person that got a front-page Digg for digitalpoint.com previously. Digg is powerful... a crazy amount of traffic at once. It's also what spawned the server fundraiser going on now. I think TOPS30 needs to be stabbed.

17 Responses to “WordPress Is NOT Scaleable”

  1. Erik Says:
    April 28th, 2006 at 9:55 pm

    Try this http://elliottback.com.nyud.net:8080/wp/archives/2006/04/21/digg-defender-a-plugin-for-wordpress/

  2. piniyini Says:
    April 29th, 2006 at 9:41 am

    Hey Shawn, I bet if you did make a blog software it’d be badass. Why not man go for it …

  3. Shawn Says:
    April 29th, 2006 at 9:47 am

    Because then other people are going to bug me for a copy, and I don’t want to support other people. But I probably will end up doing it one weekend anyway (if I don’t find anything better).

  4. piniyini Says:
    April 29th, 2006 at 10:19 am

    Then make it paid, I know I’d buy one (and I imagine thousands would too) or does money do little to motivate these days … *hopes Shawn has an incredibly boring weekend*

  5. Dennis Pallett Says:
    April 30th, 2006 at 11:08 am

    Are you sure about WP not being scalable? I’ve had a few front-page Diggs on my websites, and WP seemed to handle it fine.

  6. Johan Says:
    May 1st, 2006 at 1:22 am

    Hey man, leave poor T0PS alone, he doesn’t deserve to be stabbed! :) Just raising awareness of the fund donations as well as the MPAA bollocks… ahum

    *I shall stop breaking people’s websites; I wouldn’t like it if they broke mine either…*

  7. Jason Murphy Says:
    May 12th, 2006 at 11:07 am

    Shawn,

    I highly recommend b2evolution.net — its a fork off of b2 just like WordPress originally was. Extremely customizable and extremely robust. I have two high traffic sites as well as my personal site on the same server, all are running b2e (I also have 2 wordpress installs on the server). One of the b2e sites has seen the Digg front page over 6 times in the past year (most recently this week) and b2e handled it like a breeze.

    Worth a tinkering if you get a chance to download it.

  8. Nathan Clayton Says:
    May 16th, 2006 at 8:32 pm

    A nice one that I like to use for some community-based sites is Drupal. It tends to be a bit of overkill for a blog, but it’s got a great caching system, and the ability to turn off features (such as database-intensive searches or bandwidth-intensive photo galleries) once a certain number of concurrent hits happens.

  9. Oleg Mitsura Says:
    May 16th, 2006 at 8:37 pm

    Try Drupal.
    While it is a more general framework, as opposed to simply a blog, Drupal has decent scalability and built in caching support.

  10. John Says:
    May 17th, 2006 at 9:10 am

    http://www.expressionengine.com is commercial blog software but its offers alot and is worth checking into.

  11. india forum Says:
    May 17th, 2006 at 6:12 pm

    Is the digg effect really true ?

  12. Madhu Says:
    May 17th, 2006 at 6:18 pm

    I don’t know wheather WordPress is scalable or not, but I know it works fine. I also recommends drupal, it have a lot of features.

  13. Keith Says:
    May 18th, 2006 at 5:16 am

    As far as I can see, Digg is indeed very very effective. The growth in the number of users from digg.com has expanded tremedously!

  14. random twat Says:
    May 18th, 2006 at 5:18 am

    so, are you going to share this caching technique then?

  15. Matthew Says:
    June 2nd, 2006 at 1:20 pm

    What kind of bandwidth did the digg push the site to in MBPS? I know this is kind of old. Just curious as to how much it compared to a /.

    A client of mine held up on his blog to a /. (written in aspx) but I do not know if a digg is much more then the other :)

  16. Logik! Says:
    August 2nd, 2006 at 6:54 am

    You could always take a look at CommunityServer at http://CommunityServer.org

    Has blogging as well as other functionality, if desired, and very scalable when you consider some of the sites that are based on it.

  17. Web Guide Pakistan Says:
    June 2nd, 2008 at 4:42 am

    I am constantly trying to open up the forum but i am unsuccessful in doing so because of Database error! I don’t know why it is down but there must be some reason related to Database. Here in Pakistan it is unacceptable, I also tried to open forums.digitalpoint.com from my web server (Located in USA) through putty but till now i am unable to access it.

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