Slides from scalability talk at Wordcamp Toronto 2009

1. Wordpress Scalability
Joe Taiabjee
b5media Inc.

3. (Dramatization)

6. Wordpress and Performance
• Performance is always a tradeoff between
functionality and speed
• Wordpress out of the box is pretty fast
• Plugins add functionality, but also have a cost
in terms of performance

7. Some plugins are heavier than others!
Watch for plugins that:
• Display differently for different users
• Personalize the site with user preferences
• Extra database queries
• Database writes on page loads

8. WP Cache
WP Super Cache

9. Oops! Too late!
• If people can’t get to your site, chances are
your wp-admin is dead too
• Use .htaccess to deny everyone except you
• Disable “heavy” plugins, and any non-
essential ones
• Confirm wp-cache, or wp-supercache is active
and enabled
• Offload some page content to another host
(images, js)

10. Blog Growth Roadmap
• Optimize your config first
• Poorly written themes, and heavy plugins will
cost you as you grow
• Scaling your infrastructure multiplies your
good habits as well as bad

11. Hosting Infrastructure
• Short Term Spike vs. Traffic Growth
• As your base traffic grows, the spikes get
bigger
• Try to stay one step ahead of your traffic
growth

12. Shared Hosting

13. Shared Hosting

14. Virtual Private Server (VPS)

15. Blog Growth Roadmap
• Have access to change configuration
• Can even replace apache with other
webserver software
• Information on Wordpress Codex to help
optimize your configuration
• Disadvantage: you need to know what you are
doing!

16. Dedicated Server

17. 2 Servers
Database
Web

18. Scale out Web Servers
Database
Web
Load Balancer

19. Blog Growth Roadmap
• Keep docroots in sync
– Particularly wp-content/uploads
– Just a few servers, use NFS
• Issues with Supercache
– Batcache with Memcached
• Removes single point of failure
• Doesn’t have to be expensive
• Scales really well from here, just by adding web
servers

20. Scale out Web Servers
Database
Web
Load Balancer

21. Redundancy
Databases
Web
Load Balancer

22. Questions?
Joe Taiabjee
http://www.b5media.com/
http://www.joetek.ca/
@joetek