Wordpress Traffic Issues?

I read this on a blog today:

Is this true?

 

no this is 100 % not true,

wordpress is very good. and will not choke if you get 50,000 unique visitors a day. the guy probably had some hosting issues.

it is all about your hosting.. wordpress has nothing to do with it dont worry

 

no!! my wp still kicking

 

WordPress is fine. As mentioned, a host could choke if they didn't know how to handle the traffic.

 

Thanks for the responses guys....good to know

 

I'd actually disagree, WordPress is not good with high traffic especially if you have any semi resource hungry plugins.

I'm on a dedicated server and get about 15K uniques a day and do find that WP chokes at busy times.

I'd still recommend WP but you do need to monitor it and either tweak your site or throw hardware at it.

 

Would you like to tell us the plugins?

 

I don't know for certain that these are causing a problem but from what they do I'd guess they'd be fairly resource intensive.
- Related Posts
- Search Meter (I tweaked this for SEO but it so I've made more resource hungry than it would be by default)
- My own plugins to convert normal links to affiliate links, these parse every generated page so that got to take some processor time

It is only my suspicion that these plugins are adding to my problems so don't take it as fact. According to my host it's mySQL that is creaking under high traffic and as WP hits the database a lot anyway any plugins that do the same will add to the problem.

The latest version (2.1) has reduced databases accesses and if you use WP Cache that can help loads (it never for me unfortunately).

 

Thank you!
I was about to install the "related posts" plugin but the site was/is down.
I'm on a shared host so I'm a bit afraid.Is this WP Cache you were referring to?

 

Related posts is really good from an SEO and visitor perspective so is worth having, I'd say at least try it (if you're with a decent host they should at least warn you if you're using too much resources).

Yes that is the WP Cache I was talking about, for some sites it does wonders though with mine it never (traffic pattern or something I suppose), my host recommened it to me when I was on a shared account and using 40% of CPU and memory .

 

Yup,I know it's a great plugin,that's why I wanted to install it!I'm on hostgator.com at the moment.They are so great hence I don't want to get my account suspended there!I think they would be kind enough to warn me if I did something wrong.
Again,thanks for your replies!

 

Shoemoney Runs wordpress and his blog is HIGH traffic........


You can also install a php optimizer on you server as well, like php a , or ion cube.....

 

Techcruch runs on Wordpress, top 10 blog.

As per some of the other comments, it can cause problems, particularly as the db fills (10,000+ comments/ posts). You've got to do regular maintenance on the dbs and keep a general eye on things, and watch your plugins, there's heaps out there but it's really ametuer hour, 50% are written by people who are lucky to get 100 visitors to their blogs so they're never tested properly and don't scale under pressure. aside from all that though, WP recommended...and these issues are probably true for other blogging platforms as well, I can still remember the nightmares I experience with MovableType back in the days before WP existed...indeed WP was/ is a godsend

 

Thanks nnet, when you say

What sort of maintenance do you mean?

 

No, this is not true

 

It was a problem with the 2.0 branch but i think it's quite ok now with the release of 2.1, there are many WP powered blogs out there that receives high amount of traffic evry single day so i don't think WP is a problem.

 

I find doing a check of the db's every month or so for aged blogs (particulary 18months+) and running a check/ repair does the trick, usually just via the cpanel hook in to phpmyadmin (they usually have "check" and "repair" buttons). The db's in WP don't mature well, whether it's caused by plugins, upgrades, to much data...I don't know why, but I know it happens to old blogs.

Mind you, if the sites have no traffic, no comments (even spam) and aren't being updated don't worry about it.

You'll also need to clean up the spam comments, had a site that I'd forgotten about which hadn't been touched in roughly 6 months, had 65,000 pieces of comment spam in the db (it didn't hit the blog, but even captured spam enters the db). I simply flushed the WP_comments part of the db via mysql, the blog is as good as new (prior to that had a lot of error messages). If you're not game get a paged comment plugin that allows you to view as many as you want at once from with wp-admin and delete that way.

That's about it, aside from visit each site atleast once a week....I've had one down for two weeks before I realised it was down

Eurofighter15: you've never scaled.

 

Thanks nnet. I've just done a quick DB check now and found my searchmeter table had over 500K records, pruning that down to 50K does seem to of made a difference. I've also got some new ram being fitted later today which should also help.

 

From time to time there have been some security issues with WordPress but these are typically caught and patched quickly. As long as bloggers regularly update to the latest version, then WordPress shouldn't be a problem for them.

 

wordpress has been nothing short of flawless for me