I have scaled Wordpress to multiple front end servers with not to much work (because Wordpress is stateless and doesn't have sessions you dont even have to worry bout sharing sessions).
The only thing you need to worry about is having a shared storage for the uploads. You can do this through a NAS or I just upload to s3 then use a CDN.
If you get to the size that you need to have multiple databases (which you shouldn't if your using a page cache plugin like the official Batcache plugin) wordpress offers HyperDB as a solution.
I am actually going to be working on a Wordpress-a-a-Service type hosting solution where speed and scalability will never be a problem for the customer.
Where Wordpress does not scale is the default install on shared hosting or a VPS with little resources.
Finally I just wanted to thank Matt and the whole team at automatic for all their hard work into a maybe in-prefect but much used work-horse of the internet.
> Where Wordpress does not scale is the default install on shared hosting or a VPS with little resources.
True for shared environment but WP does fine even on a low-end vps. 2-3 years ago I helped someone setup wp on a lowend vps server which successfully handled ~5million pageviews under 24 hours, the vps had a measly 1gb memory and the memory usage never went over 700mb. nginx/php-fpm/varnish/apc/w3t done. Took me less than 1 hour to set it up.
I don't understand when people complain about wordpress being bloat but at the same time wants it to solve all kinds of problem right out of the box.
Unfortunately most of the issues come from WordPress being written for a web that existed 10 years ago. Static pages with little dynamic content.
This doesn't really work on a more "modern" style of site, where the content is more dynamic and changeable.
Again, a lot of these issues only really arise when your product moves past being a blogging-style platform (such as happened to us), but this is something that either WP, or the WP community, seems to be striving for more and more.
Yes, yes, the famous hosting environment argument. It comes up whenever the WP team just don't want to do work on the actual guts of the system as opposed to tickbox features.
When they added autoupdate, that had large host environment implications. Import/export has host environment implications. It goes on and on.
There's no technical reason they can't have a simple page cache in mainline that turns itself off when there's no write access.
Not to mention that WordPress is now popular enough to bully hosting companies if they wished to do so. What hosting company would want to admit that their services are incompatible with the latest version of WordPress? WordPress is no longer under any realistic obligation to respect the lowest common denominator of hosting environments, because whatever it requires will become the norm. It's a trememdous power that few open-source projects enjoy, and one that could be used for the greater good. If the next version of WordPress just went ahead and required PHP 5.4, for example, the hosting industry would have no choice but to upgrade their PHP versions a.s.a.p.
I agree
>and doesn't scale well.
Wordpress scales fine, but it dosent do it magically its self out of the box (but what hobbyist web project written 10 years ago did?)
Smashing magazine talked to some of the bigger wp installs to see how they did it (Hot air is doing 45mil /page view a month) http://wp.smashingmagazine.com/2012/09/12/secrets-high-traff...
I have scaled Wordpress to multiple front end servers with not to much work (because Wordpress is stateless and doesn't have sessions you dont even have to worry bout sharing sessions).
The only thing you need to worry about is having a shared storage for the uploads. You can do this through a NAS or I just upload to s3 then use a CDN.
If you get to the size that you need to have multiple databases (which you shouldn't if your using a page cache plugin like the official Batcache plugin) wordpress offers HyperDB as a solution.
I am actually going to be working on a Wordpress-a-a-Service type hosting solution where speed and scalability will never be a problem for the customer.
Where Wordpress does not scale is the default install on shared hosting or a VPS with little resources.
Finally I just wanted to thank Matt and the whole team at automatic for all their hard work into a maybe in-prefect but much used work-horse of the internet.