[trebor]

I have used and developed in Wordpress since 3.2. Mullenweng is a dictator and maverick, and I’m not convinced that he’s good for the Wordpress ecosystem.

But neither are highly customized WP hosting platforms.

Revisioning, especially since the post_meta table was added, is a huge burden on the DB. I’ve seen clients add 50 revisions, totaling thousands of revisions and 200k post meta entries. Important enough to call disabling it by default a “cancer”? Chill out Matt.

Revisions aren’t relevant past revision 3-5.

[orf]

What database is burdened by 200k rows? That’s tiny.

[trebor]

It’s the excess, unaccessed content. The indexes haven’t been well optimized in MySQL (MariaDB is better).

But still. A lot of small companies only pay $20/mo for hosting …

[orf]

But a database can handle tens of millions of rows with those resources.

If you’re worried about excess, why even use Wordpress? My god - serving rarely updated static content with a database? Stupid. The entire thing is excessive and wasteful.

[trebor]

Maybe you misunderstand the market my employer serves?

We've built sites for clients both huge and small. Our clients like WordPress because it's well supported, easy to roll out, and easy to find someone to work on. Lots of people have experience with it, from having their own blog.

Even infrequently updated content can go through a logjam of revisions. And this is the failure of WordPress's versioning model: there's no way to "check in" a revision. So you can't mark what's approved/reviewed. Instead of a "check in" that nukes the middle revisions ... now you have 5-7 revisions where someone updated a button text.

Add in ACF fields (which uses approx 2.5 rows in post_meta PER FIELD) and now you've got a complex page with lots of rows that build it up. Now each "revision" is 1 post row + 20 - even 1000 post_meta rows. You see the problem.

Over time the DB bloats, and the index isn't partitioned in any way. That page a cheap dev built to query something? Runs 5x slower after a year, and the client doesn't know why.

The only reason we use WP over other platforms is: support, maintenance, but most importantly to the client COST.