<div>Yep. A Linode 1536, kept intentionally nearly idle and with about 800MB of ram for caching. Using stock Apache, PHP, and Mysql with Ubuntu 10.04 LTS. </div><div><br></div><div>All of my optimization time has been spent on my Rails apps. So for sure, the Wordpress installs may benefit from Nginx and some other improvements. </div><div><br></div>
<p style="color: #A0A0A8;">On Tuesday, April 24, 2012 at 8:51 AM, Doug Stewart wrote:</p>
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<span><div><div><div>Not to pee in your cornflakes, Otto, but his article DID point out</div><div>he's on a Linode VPS already.</div><div><br></div><div>On Tue, Apr 24, 2012 at 11:35 AM, Otto <<a href="mailto:otto@ottodestruct.com">otto@ottodestruct.com</a>> wrote:</div><blockquote type="cite"><div><div>On Tue, Apr 24, 2012 at 9:28 AM, Robb Shecter <<a href="mailto:robb@weblaws.org">robb@weblaws.org</a>> wrote:</div><blockquote type="cite"><div><div>Yes, I guess so ... but now talking about a CDN means we're talking about</div><div>well funded, pro users, and that's not really my concern here. I'm thinking</div><div>about both novice as well as technically savvy users who are simply starting</div><div>a new blog as I was. I just wanted a reliable WP install, and I thought I</div><div>was being conservative: installing only WP, a featured theme from the Admin</div><div>panel, and a single plugin, Akismet.</div><div><br></div><div>It turns out that this setup is *not* reliable; in fact, it could lock you</div><div>out of your server.</div></div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>Okay...</div><div><br></div><div>While I agree that a theme serving 36 static images on a</div><div>single-page-load is stupid, this is not the primary problem here.</div><div><br></div><div>Server configuration is a highly complex topic. Yes, a default Apache</div><div>install using mod_php or even FastCGI would choke and die under such a</div><div>load, and that's what you get for getting cheap shared hosting. No</div><div>amount of theme optimization is going to save you there though, and</div><div>even though your case had a problem with serving static files, other</div><div>cases won't. *This is a problem with your setup, not with the theme*.</div><div>You have to have your setup capable of handling the expected load. A</div><div>well-setup server using nginx and perhaps proxy caching, along with an</div><div>object caching plugin (like W3 Total Cache, which I use), could handle</div><div>that sort of load just fine, even with a good redditing (hyeh hyeh</div><div>hyeh!).</div><div><br></div><div>Bottom line: If you care about your website working at all, then it's</div><div>worth more than $20 a month. "Well-funded"? For under $30 a month you</div><div>can get a hosting account that will handle very large loads of 300k+</div><div>visitors, easily. If you're wedded to your $5 plan, then yeah, you're</div><div>going to fail under large traffic. No amount of optimization of your</div><div>PHP code will fix that. What you've fixed by switching themes is</div><div>temporary, at best. You got the site working again, but you didn't</div><div>really fix the underlying problem.</div><div><br></div><blockquote type="cite"><div><div>I guess that for me, I'd sum it up like this: Wordpress is making a promise</div><div>to users. That, out of the box, it'll work well. Not well enough to handle</div><div>true slashdotting or front page of <a href="http://cnn.com">cnn.com</a>, but well enough for small</div><div>traffic and the occasional link from Hacker News.</div></div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>No, WordPress is not making that promise, because that promise is</div><div>completely unrealistic. On most shared hosting I've seen, even 100%</div><div>static sites will fail under a moderate load. Shared hosting is</div><div>oversold to hell, slow, and frequently buggy. If you expect to get any</div><div>real traffic, then you need to switch to a higher tier. Maybe a VPS.</div><div><br></div><div>-Otto</div><div>_______________________________________________</div><div>theme-reviewers mailing list</div><div><a href="mailto:theme-reviewers@lists.wordpress.org">theme-reviewers@lists.wordpress.org</a></div><div><a href="http://lists.wordpress.org/mailman/listinfo/theme-reviewers">http://lists.wordpress.org/mailman/listinfo/theme-reviewers</a></div></div></blockquote><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>-- </div><div>-Doug</div><div>_______________________________________________</div><div>theme-reviewers mailing list</div><div><a href="mailto:theme-reviewers@lists.wordpress.org">theme-reviewers@lists.wordpress.org</a></div><div><a href="http://lists.wordpress.org/mailman/listinfo/theme-reviewers">http://lists.wordpress.org/mailman/listinfo/theme-reviewers</a></div></div></div></span>
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