Fuck Wordpress
 

After 4 years, two hosts, countless hosting packages including dedicated servers and more hours on research than anyone should spend on trying to figure out how to keep the fucking script stable with a large well trafficked group of blogs, I fucking give up.

I'll figure out what to do to get my fucking server stable again and if that means dropping a couple large sites so be it.

Then off to newbie land and building free sites and trying to make some fucking money once again!

The free sites is more difficult to be indexed by google than blogs :)

WOrdpress is by far the most search engine friendly application there is really. Google loves it.

I respectfully disagree. (See how that's done, ned?)

A free site isn't anymore difficult to get indexed than any other page. It all depends on its construction and who is linking to it, just like anything else.

Google doesn't care if you use WordPress or Joomla or static pages. Inbound links, content and on-site optimization are what matters.

WordPress can be user-friendly and pretty, but if you use multiple plugins and SEO mods, you're putting a drag on the server.

Hi Walrus,

Sorry to here things are not going well for you. Is it the script that is causing problems or just blogging per se? There are always other blogging tools like Moveable Type or Joomla.

Personally, I've found that for the income I can generate that blogging was just not worth it. Maybe I am just not good at it.

None-the-less, good luck.

Have you tried Blogs Organizer? I haven't tried it myself but there seem to be a lot of people that swear by it. I'm considering giving it a go someday here but I haven't had any issues with WP. |huh

Having helped a number of wordpress powered sites, Walrus has reached a conclusion that a number of other people have reached.

The issue really isn't with BlogsOrganizer powering the network of sites, but, the fact that wordpress in a high traffic situation does not perform well. Their recent changes to their tables to hold revisions in the main table means that a site that has 1000 articles, each having a minor edit or two, results in a main post table with 3000+ records. Coupled with the fact that wordpress's indexes on that table are less than optimal for the types of queries, and the fact that the tag cloud is created with an utter mess of code, pushing a large amount of traffic through wordpress becomes problematic. wp-cache and wp-super-cache merely delay the inevitable.

A large, high traffic network running on wordpress will melt down with enough traffic. Add in pings and trackbacks and google scanning those 500 posts on 60+ blogs on one machine and you've got 30000 pageviews from Googlebot every week or so. And while googlebot's network will only scan 1 page per domain per bot per minute, if you've got 60 blogs, its hitting wordpress 60 times a minute on top of your normal traffic.

Wordpress was never designed with that type of activity. Neither was Joomla. MovableType writes static files which are infinitely better behaved.

And yes, google likes the default wordpress templates, but, that doesn't mean that it is the best. Their default templates and many of the supplied templates do have coding errors and are not optimal, but, are not too bad.

Walrus, I have another client with similar issues -- he's out of town right now, but, you might want to chat with him. He's about ready to write his own software or contract it out. Perhaps you can collaborate.

Walrus what number of wp blogs do You have!? is one table with multiple table prefixes or more tables!? Interested as to have a server with one to manny wp's but low in traffic for now.

I've been hanging around this board here for a while and think I have a good base knowledge of the free site game from the perspective of someone who really hasn't played it.

While I know I have tons to learn on the subject, I think I've got a pretty good jump on a lot of people

Wordpress by itself has nothing to do with it. The basic templates with wordpress are more SE friendly than most people can build simply because they don't know much about optimization.

Again, while I concede I know very little on the optimization front, I'm also sure my experiences to date put me ahead of most of the crowd.

Or maybe the problem is things ar going too well. Blogging takes patience, tons of it and time but in the long run you can build a network of blogs that can generate money. Until they get too big, that is.

Wait until you have around 10k worth of posts on a blog and getting 5-6k a day in traffic. Multiply that by 4. I promise you'll melt what ever server your on.

BO is a nice script and I do own a copy but if your building more than splogs your extremely limited. It just doesn't have the required features to compete outside of the splog arena

Thanks, ya put me in touch maybe we can do something together. I've definately got some idea's on what I'd like to see from a script.

On the problematic server it's only 10. But my 4 oldest, most heavily trafficed blogs are on that server.

Well that sucks |banghead|

The MovableType suggestion seems interesting.

It would be interesting to see and hear just what the differences are between wordpress and movable type, in practice, for adult commercial blogging.

Tho, the larger question about stable profitability hangs over the whole blogging endeavor. It's hard to imagine, if signups were solid, that stability couldn't be resolved.

If WordPress would have remained a blogging engine rather than attempting to create a CMS that anyone could use for any purpose and have the ability to work with every possible plugin, it would have been better off. Small and stable, sort of like me, is better in the long run than big and versatile. I suppose you could grab an old release of WP and have a programmer integrate features that are needed and eliminate extra processes.

There is the option of moving to drupal or perhaps a different platform but at this point in time it's a question of time and effort versus profitability. Like I said originally, I sunk a lot of time and money trying to stabilize WP already.

In the long run, a port over to Drupal seems likely but in the near future I think I'll be focusing on other avenues than WP or blogging

If memory serves and if ronnie is still running around he might be able to enlighten on Movable Type as I believe that was his initial script and then he moved to WP

Give textpattern a go.

I forgot to say, its got a Wordpress import feature and oodles of plugins... you've just got to port your template across

I never liked wordpress, that's why I went with http://www.b2evolution.net/

I run multidomain blogs on a couple of servers and it is very stable. If you need help, I can recommend you a coder for installs and mods.

This is coming at a time when I'm deciding on scripts for new projects. And between what I'm seeing here and have noticed myself, I'm interested in looking at alternatives to WordPress too.

I'd like to know more about MovableType too (I think Cleo uses or used to use it somewhere). And I'm taking another look at b2evolution now that I see it has tags and can run multiple blogs from one install. Mostly I'd like to know how those two perform with multiple blogs getting decent traffic on the same box.

I running mainstream blog on b2evo so if you want to look LMK.Traffic is low and database seems to be big for that amount of posts

I think it may be possible to get wordpress to publish static pages.

Yeah? How?

Well it will take reworking wordpress from the Admin area. More like a switch that will allow an admin to set how the blog should be accessed. I will look into this to know which way will work. I don't know if a plugin can do it. I will tell you which one I think might work when I take a look at the code.
You gotta remember, most of the actions that happen on a wordpress site are read actions. Unless you are getting a lot of comments from users.

Anybody got movabletype adult blogs?

I'm still curious about the movabletype option, or any blogging system that makes fixed html pages.

I've been studying this question ever since walrus brought it up.

But, curiously, I'm not finding a lot of people complaining about wordpress mucking up or fucking up their server.

All I see is wordpress praise - this page posted over at the zoo about how wonderful wordpress is for operating high traffic magazine and video sites for example:

http://www.wpzoom.com/plugins/wordpr...atform-part-1/

I was wondering if anybody here has any links to other people or pages talking about wordpress doing this, that is, crashing a server with a relatively low traffic porn blog?

---

On another note, wow, movable type templates appear to suck. No wonder it lost market share.

One of the comments on that post sums it up pretty well.
Those high traffic news sites aren't using an out-of-the-box installation of WP. A lot of code has been tossed/optimized. I have the feeling that a lot of coders who have sifted through WP's script pages in order to optimize it probably wish they had created their own platform instead. I don't want to make it sound like WP is shit. It's not. It's an excellent platform for the average user.

I'll throw down a big vote for looking at Drupal. I run a bunch of mainstream sites on it and it has fantastic capacity to run multiple sites on one installation. There are a lot of features for "throttling" content delivery and the caching system is very good. I'm only just recently re-doing an adult site or three with it so I'm still working out which modules/optimizations/etc. are best for this space, but my experience in the other side of the 'Net is pretty good.

It's a very good system, IMO. I'm not an expert on massively-trafficked sites, but there are many huge sites running on Drupal... The Onion, for instance. (I know that as UW says, high traffic news sites aren't running anything oob, but still, the system is built with stability & scalability in mind.)

Two cents deposited. :P

Hmmmm, drupal's not bad, I've messed with it a bit.

I wonder if anyone's built any large adult sites with it? Anyone know?

I have no idea wether drupal would be free of this apparent wordpress problem. It does have a reputation for stability.

I had to check again to confirm the multisite thing - looks easy and doable.

I might try it, just to mess with drupal more than I have.

If you decide on cool modules, it would be interesting to hear about it.

It might have been on the Drupal site but in my research I did run across a testimonial from a mainstream site that had "outgrown" their wordpress install and ported everything over to drupal and are extremely happy and continued on their growth.

There are some very key modules & workflows that help a lot with putting sites together. Primarily I've found Views to be indispensable, but it's not overly simple, IMO. To introduce it, basically you can take anything in the database and display it roughly any way you want, creating "views" of your data fields in about any configuration you want. Combined with very flexible theming, you can create sweet-looking pages (or posts or "nodes", etc.) that are quite custom.

I'm currently working on pulling in feeds and stripping out elements to display in a custom format... might not be able to go to far with this concept in the immediate future, since I have a mainstream client starting to bug me about doing a Flash game for him. I swear it's taken me forever to get my adult domains working for me again!

I wonder what I should make of a recent resonably long thread over at the zoo that seems to be a paen to wordpress, expecially the latest version, and repeatedly bashes drupal?

No mention of wordpress limitations in the thread, at least so far. Since I'm hunting for more analysis of this auggested wordpress problem, I find that lack of worries about wordpress interesting.

Somone mentions an adult site built with joomla, sounds like it might be a surfer board kinda thing - which means what, a shitload of stolen content and bandwidth?

I've never personally installed joomla - I probably should, just to see how it works - the frequent claim being that the joomla bbs package is way better than drupal - and since the drupal bbs systems I've seen didn't thrill me, WAY worse than vbulletin, I can believe that joomlas bbs is better.

Briefly, on each page that is composed, wordpress runs the following query:

The query is dynamically generated, and, is almost unindexable in its general state, but, that's not where the issue comes to play. You can see that it is picking the 25 most recent posts, but, SQL_CALC_FOUND_ROWS requires it to continue to do a tablescan to get the total number of rows so wordpress can figure out pagination.

Hit the front page of a wordpress site, and generally that query will be cached. If you hit that on all of your archive pages, each time the page is generated, it must hit that query. The query holds an exclusive lock on the tables, so, when googlebot hits the first page holds the lock, the second requests must wait until the previous request finishes then holds its lock, the third page requires both of the previous to complete, and the saga continues.

When you have 100 posts on your blog, its not really that much of an issue, but, with 2000 posts on your blog, it creates a bit of a backlog. With the introduction of 2.6, wordpress got the brilliant idea to hold revisions in the main table (their beta held revisions in a separate table). Now, when you get a feed post in from a sponsor, and you edit it to fix a quote mark or something else, then see a third mistake so you edit that, now, your 2000 post blog quickly gets 6000 records that it must sort through.

Put 80 blogs on a server when googlebot starts hitting and you've got a mess.

Joomla/Mambo is not without its faults. Even version 1.5 does its own processing of images to check permissions and will crumble under load -- especially with the SEO plugin.

Any of them can handle a high traffic site with enough load balancers, caching servers, mysql pools, etc.

Now, the one thing that kills wordpress/joomla/mambo/drupal is the fact that they insert themselves into the '404' process. By handling 404's themselves, all of the processing required to run the page is executed everytime firefox asks for favicon.ico and it isn't there -- or any file that 404's. A missing stylesheet, thumbnail image, icon, etc can cause havoc in the site in addition to its normal load.

All boils down to people that write software for simplicity rather than performance. The age old example is the picture of the day script.

How many times a day do you need to decide which picture to display? I don't know how many scripts I've seen that count the number of images in a directory and do a modulo based on the julian date to figure out which one to display on each pageload. Or, the script takes the day of the month and the images are listed as 01.jpg, 02.jpg, etc.

Engineering to run a blog network like that is not without its challenges.

~heaving sigh~

And here I thought WP was the way to go for my upcoming blog. Now I've to look at Drupal, TextPattern, Moveable Type, & B2Evolution.

2 steps forward, 1 step back. Guess I'd better get used to it now that I'm heading down a completely new path.

Currently I'm taking a close look at B2evo and I do like what I see.

But being totally honest, WP is still a good script. I simply pushed it further than what was envisioned by those who created it. I would guess that about 90% of the bloggers would never have an issue.

Use it for what it was intended, a blogging script that takes care of posts in a reverse order. If you want to add a bunch of pages, like galleries, do it in static HTML and don't use the page function in WP. Keep your plug-ins to a minimum and I doubt you'd ever have a problem.

Gee, now you tell us, hahahahha.

Sounds like you might have been abusing the hell out of that poor puppy.

So whats to like about b2evo?

Shit, I just figured no one really listened to what I had to say anyway. ;)

So far what I I'm liking is that a lot of the features I wanted with WP I had to use a plug-in for. B2Evo seems to have that functionality built into it. I'll assume that means a lot less conflicts with various plug-ins and that when updates occur you don't nearly the concern about whether your plug-ins will work with the new release and if the original author will bother updating it at all.

B2Evo is a multi-blog platform so I believe it should be pretty easy to cross promote your blogs provided they are on the same domain.

It was simple to move posts from WP into B2Evo. While I probably wont do much of that, it's nice to know I can.

I still need a bit more time with the script to really say for sure if it's where I'm going to settle for future projects but so far I'm liking what I see.

I'm a few steps behind you, Walrus, but I'm quickly getting tired of some of the issues you've been discussing with WP.

well fuck, I broke a Wordpress blog I've been working on by adding to many categories
BO badly needs an update (tags and categories)
So tell me Walrus how goes b2evo?
Can feeds be added with BA?
Does it have decent Tagging?

It does have XMLRPC capability so I would assume BA would work.

Don't know what happened but when I was doing all the shit I was doing moving from box to box to box my copy of BA must have gotten misplaced as it is no longer installed. BASTARDS!

It does do a good job with tags.

Before there was WP or even B2Evo there was Evolution. It split into those two scripts many years ago. The nice thing is that it's admin interface is similar enough to WP that it's pretty comfortable navigating a new script.

I hope that doesn't mean that if has many of the same problems WP has.

Pat if you want to take a look around the admin area let me know and I'll set you up a user / pass and you can play till your hearts content.

|thumb please do
You know you can download BA again at the owners lounge, you will have to reinstall it on the same domain.
Kaktus told me he would have the new BO update done by the end of the month, I'm not holding my breath|angry|

Ya, I know but that means I need to input all those fucking feeds again! But I do have a few splogs that need them so I guess I best get it done :(
Seems like I've heard that before.

Check your PM's for some exciting news from The Walrus....ok nevermind just check your pm

Thanx Walrus
Now you have a PM