[jepler]

In 1999(!) the earliest version of the C10k paper I tracked down had this to say:

And computers are big, too. You can buy a 500MHz machine with 1 gigabyte of RAM and six 100Mbit/sec Ethernet card for $3000 or so. Let's see - at 10000 clients, that's 50KHz, 100Kbytes, and 60Kbits/sec per client. It shouldn't take any more horsepower than that to take four kilobytes from the disk and send them to the network once a second for each of ten thousand clients. (That works out to $0.30 per client, by the way. Those $100/client licensing fees some operating systems charge are starting to look a little heavy!) So hardware is no longer the bottleneck.

(http://web.archive.org/web/19990508164301/http://www.kegel.c...)

If we haven't fixed the C10k problem with 17 years of hardware advancements, it's a pretty poor reflection on software engineering.

[tracker1]

Static content generation, better optimizations and caching settings would go a long way... hell since many blogs are using third party comment systems, they should probably cache all requests for not logged in users for 5 minutes by default... it's up the application servers though.

Making any variance between logged in, and not logged in visitors limited to JS enhanced interactions would help for most systems too.

A current server can pretty easily hit C100K per cpu core... There have been test runs at over a million concurrent connections on a single large server instance. It's all on the application design... using an application that's a couple decades old as a common baseline is part of the problem... honestly, wordpress should just die already.

[fffrad]

When you get the one click wordpress install on some hosting companies, you also get a lot of preinstalled plugins.

These plugins only bloat your website.

[tracker1]

Not to mention missing and/or poorly configured caching defaults...