Re:9 million hits/day with 120 megs RAM
by EponymousCoward on Wednesday August 31, 2011 @11:11AM
(#2945863)
3000 hits over 2 hours is < 0.5 hits/second and nothing to write home about, sorry.
The raw number wasn't the point. WP is notorious for collapsing under a gentle load without caching.
The commenter also didn't take into account that the req/sec was probably not evenly distributed across 2 hours.
I can vouch for that. I've had vanilla WP die on me from the gentle load that comes with a link going on HN. I assumed it was performant out of the box ... learned my lesson!
W3 Total Cache really is a first rate plugin, we've had great success throwing Varnish https://www.varnish-cache.org/ infront of WordPress
W3TC integrates with varnish and supports a number of backend web servers.
The permissions changes it asks for are because caching plugins need to create files on the server and most servers are either poorly configured or managment of groups:users is difficult, so temporarily requesting that users modify permissions so that the caching plugin can create the files for the user improves the installation experience via lowering the technical experience needed and the number of steps required.
I don't recommend suPHP in practice as it's quite slow, similar if not better security can be realized by using a reverse proxy, and then running PHP in fastcgi mode for example with a backend web server.
Re:9 million hits/day with 120 megs RAM
by xinsight on Wednesday August 31, 2011 @11:58AM
(#2946116)
My concern with the wordpress cacheing plugins I've looked at is that they require the webserver to have write access to the webserver directory. This is particularly dangerous on shared webhosts, as a malicious customer on the same server could write php files in your cache directory.
I'm pretty sure that W3 Total Cache writes to /wp-content/uploads which you'd need to be writeable anyway.
Pre-gzipped pages are nice too. :)