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As someone who worked as lead dev for a blog network that does 10M+ visitors a month, here's the thing: if you've gotten your blog to 10M hits a day, you likely have a massive amount of content (we had about 1M posts over 5 or 6 years and about as many comments); that is, far too much to get into cache on a $15 server. Every page gets cached, every gallery page gets cached (if you've got photo galleries), every comment page gets cached and all of those have objects/actual DB rows that get cached as well. With that much content, the GoogleBot alone will kill you if you're not careful.

These are all great tips to help you scale, but unless you've got a very small site WP site that is also doing 10M hits a day, there are many more complications. Once I have a little more spare time, I'll have to blog about some other solutions we've come up with.




Of course, all this really lets you do is survive a swarm of people from (for example) here, digg, a tweet meme, stuff like that, which will direct everyone at one single page on your site.

But I think that's the most likely cause of that kind of traffic on a small cheap VPS, as anyone running a big site without clustering is just being silly :)


Yup, that's fair. And there are actually ways to scale WP beautifully with a small amount of servers (we're using less than 5 servers to handle our 10M visitors a month and content archive). Again, I keep meaning to blog about it, I just need to find the time.

Anyways, I'm all for articles like this that help optimize WP sites and get rid of the stigma that WP doesn't scale without cost. Thanks for writing it.


Thanks :)

Hope I see a blog post from you about it sometime soon, I think the details around that kind of stuff are far too hard to discover for people trying to learn about it.


its an interesting academic investigation. In theory, you could do 10M pv/day with a relatively small archive. I bet some recently launched sites that take off quickly (PandoDaily for example) probably do decent traffic levels with a pretty small number of posts, that would probably fit into a small cache.

But that's all theoretical. There's no way someone running a site with that kind of traffic should be running on shared resources without an infrastructure. When that $15 server needs a reboot, the site is offline, and that would be a significant amount of lost traffic.

Capacity, speed, redundancy and cost of downtime... You really shouldn't run on this kind of architecture.


I can't agree more with this, we've just redesigned a site with 50m+ per mo with articles in the hundreds of thousands. Akamai Caching and google indexing alone can turn a relatively steady paced site into a snail.




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