[wp-hackers] Forum post: Huge server hits

[Jason Bainbridge]

On 7/12/05, Jason A. Hoffman <jason at textdrive.com> wrote:
> On Jul 12, 2005, at 2:54 AM, Podz wrote:
> 
> > http://wordpress.org/support/topic/38937
> >
> >  "as a recation to the attacks in london we set up a website called
> > werenotafraid.com, and we are running it on a wordpress blog. i am
> > not pimping the project here, my questions is of a somewhat
> > technical nature.
> >
> > the project has really taken off, we had 11 million hits in just a
> > few days, but we had to notice that the wordpress software was not
> > able to deal with the load:"
> >
> > It's been linked from the BBC too so the problem will remain. I've
> > pointed the guy at staticise-reloaded, but maybe this number of
> > hits needs something more ?
> >
> > P.
> 
> Not to inject myself here, but why do people slap up a wordpress site
> (or anything for that matter) on a little server, and then expect a
> piece of software to just scale up automatically?
> 
> What kind of hardware is it on? What web server? What mysql? What ...?

A tracert leads it to:

http://moblog.co.uk/help.php?thesite

"Q: How does it all work?

One linux server, a few thousand lines of php, a sprinkling of mySql
and a dab of procmail magic. Mmmm, tasty."

One shared server for all the other moblog.co.uk users plus a high
traffic website such as this is not going to scale well no matter how
you do it, especially when your front page is about 220k all up. Using
a cache plugin or similar to save hits to MySQL and CPU time to
generate the dynamic page would help some but it isn't going to be a
magic pill given the environment.

For a site like that you NEED a dedicated server to begin with and
thenn you need to look at doing things like serving images using a
light weight webserver to spread the load amongst other things.

Regards,
-- 
Jason Bainbridge
http://kde.org - webmaster at kde.org
Personal Site - http://jasonbainbridge.com