[pipeline_peak]

The fact that author automatically jumps to “distributed system cloud goodness” has me glazed over.

We don’t need a new Wordpress that subscribes to today’s current tech trends.

“It doesn’t scale well” what does that even mean?

[camillomiller]

It means that the author has no idea what they are talking about. Probably never heard of Kinsta, for example. We ran a successful network of about 70 wp installs that had peaks of 8.000 concurrent visitors for hours per day already in 2011/2012. Our sysadmin at the time deployed the whole thing over 2 server clusters behind a wonderful load balancer he fine tuned on OVH. Total monthly costs: 800€.

That was 14 years ago. So imagine thinking that wordpress is “behind” in 2026 just because it doesn’t subscribe to the deranged cloud subscription culture that has infected the industry.

Wordpress has heaps of technical and non technical issues to solve (especially in governance), but being server-side ain’t one of them.

[nchmy]

When you say 8000 concurrent visitors, is that per site or across the 70 installs? And what sorts of sites were they?

Because there's an immense difference when it comes to hosting between a blog/brochure site that is fully cachable and a woocommerce or, worse, social network/LMS/other highly dynamic site.

To be clear though, I'm not advocating for distributed cloud architecture - that sort of stuff is best done on a vertically-scaled server, which can get up to many hundreds of CPUs these days.

[camillomiller]

They where dynamic publishing sites, so not supercomplicated and absolutely cached to the brim. A big chung of the concurrent visitors (prob like 90%) where on two websites, so two installs.

[nchmy]

Ok. Yeah, you could easily have 100k concurrent visitors with that, if the request isn't actually reaching php/WordPress. On e it does, you're down to something like 2-4, maybe 10, requests per cpu core, per second. Depends on the hardware and how the site is configured.