True for shared environment but WP does fine even on a low-end vps. 2-3 years ago I helped someone setup wp on a lowend vps server which successfully handled ~5million pageviews under 24 hours, the vps had a measly 1gb memory and the memory usage never went over 700mb. nginx/php-fpm/varnish/apc/w3t done. Took me less than 1 hour to set it up.
I don't understand when people complain about wordpress being bloat but at the same time wants it to solve all kinds of problem right out of the box.
Yeap, you got it. Php-fpm and apc goes a long way ;)
They're always in my "secret weapons" arsenal when I need to checklist a slow PHP/Drupal installation, especially when they're hosted on VPC or AWS.
This doesn't really work on a more "modern" style of site, where the content is more dynamic and changeable.
Again, a lot of these issues only really arise when your product moves past being a blogging-style platform (such as happened to us), but this is something that either WP, or the WP community, seems to be striving for more and more.
10 years, still no file cache shipping with the mainline. That solves 90% of the problem for 90% of sites.
http://codex.wordpress.org/Class_Reference/WP_Object_Cache#P...
On the other hand, as of my understanding Drupal does page caching to DB by default (straight out of the box?) and seems super quick.
When they added autoupdate, that had large host environment implications. Import/export has host environment implications. It goes on and on.
There's no technical reason they can't have a simple page cache in mainline that turns itself off when there's no write access.
I agree
>and doesn't scale well.
Wordpress scales fine, but it dosent do it magically its self out of the box (but what hobbyist web project written 10 years ago did?)
Smashing magazine talked to some of the bigger wp installs to see how they did it (Hot air is doing 45mil /page view a month) http://wp.smashingmagazine.com/2012/09/12/secrets-high-traff...
I have scaled Wordpress to multiple front end servers with not to much work (because Wordpress is stateless and doesn't have sessions you dont even have to worry bout sharing sessions).
The only thing you need to worry about is having a shared storage for the uploads. You can do this through a NAS or I just upload to s3 then use a CDN.
If you get to the size that you need to have multiple databases (which you shouldn't if your using a page cache plugin like the official Batcache plugin) wordpress offers HyperDB as a solution.
I am actually going to be working on a Wordpress-a-a-Service type hosting solution where speed and scalability will never be a problem for the customer.
Where Wordpress does not scale is the default install on shared hosting or a VPS with little resources.
Finally I just wanted to thank Matt and the whole team at automatic for all their hard work into a maybe in-prefect but much used work-horse of the internet.