quietlife.net

NiT on WordPress?

02 Feb 2007

So, apparently Nashville Is Talking is moving from Movable Type to WordPress. I can’t say for sure that this is a bad idea, but it surely smells.. Movable Type would seem at a glance to be much more scalable than WordPress. Movable Type pushes static HTML around, whereas WordPress is entirely PHP/MySQL driven, which is infinitely slower. I’m concerned that with NiT’s performance problems in the past even with Movable Type, that this is going to be a serious detriment to their site. You can alleviate a lot of the load from the dynamic nature of WordPress by implementing rigorous MySQL query caching, installing WP-Cache, and installing a PHP caching accelerator like eaccelerator (and I certainly hope they are doing these things), but still, I find myself wondering about this particular move.

Does NiT’s webmaster perchance read this blog? I’d be curious to hear their thoughts.

Comments

Empresa Peruana — February 06, 2007 at 23:54 · reply

No, I’m not NIT’s webmaster, but when you state that the PHP/MySQL combination is “infinitely slower”, you are sorely mistaken. Most likely, their webhost server IS the culprit. If I can render a page using PHP/MySQL in under 0.03 seconds on my host, then, why can’t it work in theirs? Just some food for thought… ;)

Kynn — February 07, 2007 at 01:15 · reply

Yeah, see, Chris, you’re all wrong because it’s not INFINITELY slower. It’s just FINITELY slower.

Generating pages each time (especially without caching them) is going to be a performance lose. Maybe unpopular websites can afford to do this, or sites with huge load-balancing server clusters backing them up. But mid-size sites have to keep this in mind, especially if they may experience periodic rushes and thus performance hits. (As with NiT.)

I don’t know what host you’re specifically referring to, or the page being generated, but you do know, Empresa Peruana, that your anecdotal evidence of 0.03 seconds isn’t really a useful statistic for, like, anything?

–Kynn

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