Can WordPress 2.1 Handle It?
When I wrote my tongue-in-cheek post the other day, I’m a Mac And I’m a PC, I thought it was pretty funny but never realized it was going to take off. Within 24 hours I had about 7,000 hits – which climaxed in a cataclysmic failure of my site when it peaked with 600+ hits within an hour. That coincided with making the home page of Netscape.
First, the good news… several readers thought the post was humorous enough to post it on some social bookmarking sites. It made Digg, Reddit, and Netscape. I thought it interesting that it made the Netscape home page, but barely moved on Digg. Perhaps it was an early “lame” comment on Digg that turned folks away. Not sure… but it shows that any one of the social bookmarking sites can have a huge impact on your site.
Here’s a breakdown of hits yesterday:
My site kept up fantastically until today, when it basically just stopped. I was left with a WordPress screen telling me that I should “install” WordPress. Uh-oh. I quickly logged in via FTP and backed up the site and database directory. I then tried to access the database via PhpMyAdmin. That’s where I found the problem:
Error : 1226 User 'xxxxxx' has exceeded the 'max_questions' resource
Great news!!!! This is nothing to do with WordPress 2.1, my hosting package had a maximum query setting configured to 36,000 request per hour for a given database user. When I exceeded that request rate, the database became unavailable. This made WordPress think that the database was never installed in the first place, something WordPress probably can’t detect… it just sees a broken connection.
I used to have wp-cache installed and ran into a lot of issues with it. However, SeanRox let me know that the latest version is quite good, so I’ve reinstalled it. I like that approach much better than upping my requests on the database. WordPress 2.1 and Apache never flinched at the number of requests – so I’d much rather handle the requests by caching the pages than requerying the database for the content.
If you’re wondering what caching is, it’s simply making a copy of the page available in an alternative directory rather than looking it up in the database. When someone requests the page, it looks at the age of the cached page. If the page is old (it’s up to you how old), it will look it up again and make another cached page, but if it’s recent, it will serve up the cached page. It’s a lot more efficient to render pure HTML than to dynamically generate the HTML using PHP and MySQL… so caching is perfect for situations like this.
I wish I would have had it installed before so many visitors hit my site and thought it was down or slow!
To answer my question, can WordPress 2.1 handle it? Absolutely!
Last note… in the last 2 days, I’ve had 11,200 page impressions on my site and Google Adsense made about $45.00 within that time. I’m pretty impressed with the number of clicks that advertisements got on the site. I really wasn’t expecting that. Another way to look at this is that someone posting my post on Netscape will result in me earning about $45.00. Hmmm, anyone care to Digg this post?
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