[wp-hackers] cheap 404 serving

[Mike Bijon]

Hi Matthias,
You're right about this approach working, but it falls into the
smaller-audience side of the "80/20 rule" for WordPress inclusion.
Basically a feature like this might cause more errors on shared hosting
than it solves for admins who understand why Alex's plugin exists.

If you're looking to scale at this level it might be worth reading
everything on Barry's blog, starting with,
http://barry.wordpress.com/2007/11/01/static-hostname-hashing-in-pound/.

This is relevant to your suggestion because nginx (replaced Pound years
ago) and Varnish accomplish the same thing as Alex's plugin but in a more
fault tolerant way. In short, they forward requests to hit the WordPress
lookup logic once, which allows the processes and plugins that Otto
describes to work, then cache it to avoid the slower lookup that you point
out.

...if you know your site well then Alex/Crowd Favorite's plugin could still
help speed the first request, but so could extra nginx config.