[wp-testers] Wordpress scaling problems

[Otto]

On Thu, Jan 29, 2009 at 2:12 AM, matthijs <matthijsenator at gmail.com> wrote:
> I understand your explanation (good summery btw), but my point is that the
> problem is not that there are so many rewrite rules, but that all of them
> are placed in a single serialized string in one table field. That doesn't
> scale well, you don't have to be a database administrator to understand
> that. For the same reason you don't put all categories in a single field. Or
> all options in one field.

The difference there is that you have to load up all those rewrite
rules out of the database anyway. Whether you put them in one place or
in several places, you have to get them all in order to run them
against the url given, to figure out how to rewrite it.

So the real problem with scaling is that there are so many rules, not
that it's not normalized. Even if you normalized it or put it in
several fields or even in a whole other table, you still have to
select the whole mess and load it up into memory. Since you have to do
that, it doesn't make any difference whether it's in one row or not.

The only problem with putting it in one row is that you could
conceivably hit the max query size. And that's a configuration
problem, not a scaling one.

-Otto