> It appears that the author has some customizations (plugins..) that are really slow.
The slowest piece of code on the network today is the Recent Comments Widget. That's not a plugin, that's right there in the base install.
I worked this out myself, based on preliminary detective work by Page.ly. And then Page.ly went the rest of the way to ask a Wordpress core contributor for their opinion. The key issue is that this widget performs a query on the wp_comments table which becomes slower and slower as the number of comments rises. The only real fixes are either to move to Disqus (my bloggers said "no") or partition the table (Page.ly politely said that this was outside the scope of anything under their enterprise plans).
> Why not route your traffic through cloudfront ?
I do.
> Why not leverage full page caching for anonymous users ?
That too.
I also have memcached for the object cache, I use a tuned copy of PerconaDB and nginx is configured to serve static files and supercache-generated whole pages without ever touching PHP.
The blog post you read was served from a blog on that very blog network, on Linode servers in Tokyo that I once again personally managing.
The slowest piece of code on the network today is the Recent Comments Widget. That's not a plugin, that's right there in the base install.
I worked this out myself, based on preliminary detective work by Page.ly. And then Page.ly went the rest of the way to ask a Wordpress core contributor for their opinion. The key issue is that this widget performs a query on the wp_comments table which becomes slower and slower as the number of comments rises. The only real fixes are either to move to Disqus (my bloggers said "no") or partition the table (Page.ly politely said that this was outside the scope of anything under their enterprise plans).
> Why not route your traffic through cloudfront ?
I do.
> Why not leverage full page caching for anonymous users ?
That too.
I also have memcached for the object cache, I use a tuned copy of PerconaDB and nginx is configured to serve static files and supercache-generated whole pages without ever touching PHP.
The blog post you read was served from a blog on that very blog network, on Linode servers in Tokyo that I once again personally managing.