[thraxil]

I'm constantly amazed at how poorly Wordpress is able to perform. 2.5GB virtual server with a cache in front of it and it went down?

My blog is a Django app running on a 512MB Rackspace VM with a basic Apache, mod_wsgi, and Postgres setup. I have a dozen low traffic applications all running on the same server alongside it. I have zero caching set up so every hit is doing the full process of querying the database and pushing the results out through a template.

I was on the front page of HN last year and the server load was negligable. I have graphs: http://thraxil.org/users/anders/posts/2012/06/02/How-Django-...

[lemcoe9]

I bet if you switched to nginx, your server would use even less resources to handle the same amount of traffic.

[thraxil]

Having used nginx on other projects, I'm sure you're right. My blog setup is pretty old and hasn't really needed any improvements.

On newer deployments, I'm still using Apache+mod_wsgi to manage the Django processes (it's a setup that has been reliable for me and that I know how to debug), but I'm sticking an nginx proxy in front as a matter of course. Not for performance reasons, but just to leave myself a hook for handling later changes. I can trivially spin up additional application backend servers and load balance across them, or quickly flick a switch to have nginx cache a particular resource in an emergency.

[EwanToo]

He didn't have a cache in front of it - he had W3 total cache installed, but not enabled for object caching.

If he'd had W3 total cache, or varnish (my preferred option) in front of it, he wouldn't of noticed the impact.

There's a bigger question of why Wordpress still doesn't ship with sensible caching enabled by default, backwards compatibility with some plugins just doesn't cut it for me.