[theme-reviewers] Proposal for a new guideline and plugin function

[Doug Stewart]

Not to pee in your cornflakes, Otto, but his article DID point out
he's on a Linode VPS already.

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