>Although Wordpress crashing under load is what caused me to switch to Octopress.

It's all about the caching plugins. I had my blog hit 300k visits in the span of 8 hours, peaking at about 100 visits per second on a shared web host. Utilizing cashing plugins means every single person that visited my blog was served static content that refreshed itself every 10 minutes.

My Wordpress blog on Dreamhost shared hosting w/ WP Super Cache and Cloudflare could easily handle 100 visits/second.

200 visits/second caused blank pages half the time.

300 visits/second? Boom.

I've never used WP Super Cache so I can't comment there, but having used W3 Total Cache I can say that the performance I get with W3 Total Cache is exactly the same as when I tried out Jekyll/Octopress since both solutions are only serving static HTML files and nothing else.

Then again, 300 visits per second, estimating 250KB for the entire page (css, js, images, etc) is about 75Mbps which is going to be a lot to ask from any shared hosting provider.

Another thing to look at is using nginx as a web server. It's a lot more lightweight than Apache. Paired with a solid SSD drive and varnish caching, and you can get some really great performance out of WordPress.

I've seen Varnish choke on mainline code: the Recent Comments widget, which can invalidate an entire site whenever a comment is posted anywhere. I have one site which caused both WPEngine and Page.ly to lock up on just 30k views/day because of that.

What I do with my VPS:

1. WP Supercache is configured to write .html.gz copies to disk.

2. Nginx is configured to check if such a file exists before referring anything to PHP. If it finds the .html.gz, it will serve it directly from disk. Ordinary file caching gives it the advantages Varnish promises.

3. WP Supercache appears to correctly handle invalidation when a new comment is posted.

Probably had less to do with wordpress and more to do with shared hosting setup (memory allocation, disk space, process allocation and upstream bandwidth).

Wordpress can handle insane amount of traffic if you know what you are doing. 99% of wordpress borking under sudden spike in traffic issues can be boiled down to

- Not using caching

- Using shared hosting

And I don't understand Wordpress as a CMS. It's frankly a terrible one as well. Poor internationalization support, doesn't meet government accessibility requirements, its non-structure makes maintenance and teamwork almost impossible, its plugin structure is a landmind, terrible (no) dependency management, encourages deployment via FTP, and a terrible security model.

I'm not a Python guy, but Plone kicks its ass in pretty much every way as a CMS.

Wordpress can't seem to choose what they are- and they fail miserable from a technical perspective (yes, I know they have a huge market share, but I'm not one to believe that the markets actually pick the best option. McDonalds burgers are not the height of cuisine).

Like McDonalds, it succeeds because it's the easiest, cheapest option which is good enough (not good, but good enough).