[wp-hackers] Improving WordPress' Performance WAS Changing MySQL minimum version

[Computer Guru]

> On 11/30/06, Computer Guru <computerguru at neosmart.net> wrote:
> > No matter how you look at it, WP is horribly inefficient and now it's
> > definitely big enough that this warrants a second look. We need to do
> > something, the only question is, what?
> 
> I'm not saying you're wrong, but could you quantify this inefficiency?
>  In other words, how are you measuring it especially in comparison
> with other platforms?

No problem.
My site has a blog (WordPress), a gallery (Gallery2), and a forum (hacked
MyTopix).
Each has been dugg and slashdotted several times. It used to be that
Gallery2 was the weak point, it would kill my server the minute it made even
OSNews, never mind Slashdot. The Menalto Gallery2 team worked really hard
and fixed that up.

The forums were simultaneously dugg and slashdotted - they upheld
wonderfully, and the server only slowed down a bit.

The blog - once it gets a whiff of Slashdot or Digg without WP-Cache
installed (I *STILL* can't get it working on IIS and the author isn't really
helpful) my server collapses.
I have eAccelerator installed, I gzip content, and I have IIS tuned to the
hilt (much faster than Apache :P)

Flash Back a couple of months

WP + WP-Cache goes down much faster than the forums - no eAccelerator.


Gallery2 has some kind of very inefficient caching taking place, the forums
have no caching, and WP used to have WP-Cache.


The gallery & forums make a ton of more (and more complex) queries to the
database - and forums are especially heinous because of how often the
content changes. Yet something like WP gives me hell. And I'm not alone.

I removed all my plugins and installed LightPress for 24 hours - the effect
was instantaneous bliss. Still no caching, but all of a sudden not only did
my server not die on me every 5 minutes, but pages also loaded fast and
snappily.

.... 

Computer Guru
NeoSmart Technologies
http://neosmart.net/blog/