[wp-hackers] Forum post: Huge server hits

[Jason A. Hoffman]

On Jul 12, 2005, at 1:12 PM, Andy Skelton wrote:
> On 7/12/05, Podz <podz at tamba2.org.uk> wrote:
>> Someone posts to the forums and says "I'm going to create a  
>> website for
>> someone famous and I expect 100,000 hits a day. Can WP handle this ?"
>
> The truth about weaintskeerd.com (I forgot the url) is that /their
> hosting package/ couldn't handle the load, no matter what blogging
> software they used, even if they were serving a static HTML file.
> Jason's scenario was for 5e6 hits per day. That's 1/20th of 10 million
> hits.
>
> It would be good to have some kind of benchmark done so we could say,
> "on a dedicated 2GHz Xeon with 4GB RAM, Apache 2, [exact specs],
> WordPress has been shown to handle a XXkb page with XXXkb of graphics
> at XXXXX hits per day with peak loads of XXXX." It wouldn't be an
> end-all for these questions but it would be very valuable for anyone
> serious about setting up a high-traffic site like that.

We've already done this for a number of sites in this range, and I've  
been meaning to make such things public on our weblog as an article  
about "resource planning" and a transparent discussion of what things  
really cost (it's related to the tendency of web hosts to oversell  
resources and how I think podcasting is the end of that practice).

It's been primarily in the wake of what we did when a number of  
podcasts here found themselves on page one of iTunes, and we watched  
with them as they cranked out a terabyte of bandwidth (which we  
didn't send them a bill for, a benefit of underselling bandwidth).

It's a helpful discussion in general, because a common "goal" is to  
be "popular" and if I would use up all my fingers and toes if I  
counted the number of people who showed up at TextDrive on a $132/ 
year account, had one of these "political weblogs", then got picked  
up by a "MSNBC" and then ... we're surprised to find out that such  
popularity requires a system administrator and about $50,000 of  
hardware (that's already nicely discounted as part of our deal with  
Dell ...).

Then bandwidth ... the reality is this, when we co-lo in a "bandwidth  
competitive" environment like Equinix, then you can get down to about  
$15/Mbps/month from a single provider on a 100Mbps unmetered commit.  
This is what an "alternative" provider like Hurricane Electric is  
going down to and it's not the kind of rate that's just available to  
anyone, it's part of a larger co-location setup.

100 Mbps is 16,000GB/mo, or roughly 800 accounts x 200GB/mo

What's 200GB/mo? It's 1000 downloads a week of a 50MB (a standard  
stereo mp3 of about 40 minutes) podcast.

Hmm....

- Jason