Wordpress performs poorly.
When I first came into web development and blogging, I thought Wordpress was great. It handled many of the things that I needed handling, and it did it intuitively and fairly quickly. Since then I’ve had lots of experience with lack of performance, and optimizing web code for performance. Let’s face it, we don’t all have dedicated quad cores for webhosting, nor do we necessarily have separate boxes for DB server and webserver.
Wordpress is not optimized for large amounts of traffic. There is seemingly no caching (within Wordpress) whatsoever. On a normal pageload it makes no fewer than 10 trips back to the database. That’s why if you see a non protected Wordpress site “dugg”, or “slashdotted”, it will be down after only a moderate number of concurrent hits.
WP-Cache is a plugin for Wordpress that caches pages and posts, not requiring Wordpress to hit the database upon pageloads. I couldn’t get it to work with my Wordpress setup after about a half hour of tinkering, but in theory that would make Wordpress a robust, non-performance-hog piece of software. But the point is that there should be no excuses to creating poorly performing code. There shouldn’t have to be a user-submitted-tweak that “fixes” software to not be slow.
Maybe we’ll see it when the Wordpress team finally considers it high priority, perhaps by Wordpress version 5.9.2.
Brandon Said,
March 22, 2007 @ 2:56 pm
I completely agree with you. Wordpress is fine if you either have hosted “blogging” service from wordpress, or aren’t expecting much traffic. If you do get hit, it goes down extremely fast. Unfortunately, I don’t have the time or patience (or knowhow) to sit and write my own site with as much power and flexibility as wordpress. It would be extremely helpful for them to write cleaner running code, however at the moment, I don’t think I have anything to worry about, traffic wise.
I’ll look into WP-Cache and see if I can get it to work, though I agree that a patch isn’t really the right way to go with something this important.
Matt Said,
March 23, 2007 @ 4:55 pm
WP-Cache isn’t a patch, it’s a plugin that we specifically wrote extensions to core WP to allow it to work better. And it does work great, you can easily serve several million pageviews a day off a properly configured box with wp-cache installed.
Raybdbomb Said,
March 23, 2007 @ 11:30 pm
Right, but the point is it should be a part of the core, not an add-on. Maybe it will be in the future?
BTW, how did you find this post?
Digmann.com » Blog Archive » Wordpress Performs Poorly - Intensionally Said,
March 24, 2007 @ 1:24 pm
[...] One of the guys I went to school with, Ray, has created a post about how Wordpress performs poorly requiring sites to install extra ‘patches’ to f…. [...]
Dustin Said,
March 24, 2007 @ 1:24 pm
I wrote a devil’s advocate post about this topic here: http://www.digmann.com/2007/03/24/wordpress-performs-poorly-intensionally.html .
Raybdbomb Said,
March 24, 2007 @ 3:20 pm
I responded on your post.