An interesting article appeared on the front page of the drupal.org website, detailing the migration of the popular “crooks and liars” blog from WordPress to Drupal. According to the developers, when the site was averaging around the “200,000 hits per day mark, we started experiencing a lot of down time from server overloads. We were utilizing the famous wp-cache plugin for WordPress, as well as hosting the database on a single master and two slaves, using the HyperDB class for WordPress to handle the replication.” After experiencing a high degree of server downtime from the massive number of comments on the site, “crooks and liars” began to consider porting the site to Drupal for performance issues.

According to the site development team, benchmark tests showed that a Drupal 5.x installation was able to serve more than 8 times the number of pages per second vs. a standard WordPress 2.3 set up:

“I setup default installations of WordPress 2.3 and Drupal 5. I only enabled the core caching mechanisms in both setups and populated them with the exact same data and display options. Both systems also used the default themes and features. After running a series of tests through JMeter, I quickly confirmed my beliefs and even exceeded them as I saw Drupal was able to handle about eight times the requests per second as WordPress, both on the front page and the same single post view with 157 comments.”

An interesting overview of the migration, and custom modules used in the development of the “crooks and liars” site can be found online here:

http://drupal.org/node/341231

What is more interesting, is after the post was published, WordPress / Automattic founder Matt Mullenweg weighed in personally on the issue, by commenting on the post and listing ways to configure WordPress to scale to 20 million hits per day – at a cost of only $100 per month. He writes:

“Always sorry to see someone leave WordPress, but you ended up pretty much the other best place I could think of. Features are a great reason to switch, but scaling doesn’t need to be. We host some of the largest poltical blogs like all of CNN’s which regularly get thousands of comments per day and we do about a billion pageviews a month on WordPress.com, so here are some tips for future people who may come across this post (some which may be useful to the Drupal community as well):

1. Every release of WP gets faster, so upgrading can get you sometimes significant boosts depending on your bottleneck.
2. Use the memcached object cache backend.
3. If memcached is set up, use Batcache instead of wp-cache.
4. If you get a lot of comments, consider using InnoDB as your storage engine instead of MyISAM inside of MySQL.
5. Double-check that your webserver is set up properly for static requests, this is the cause of 90%+ of the problems we see.

With the above and a single $100/month server from LT you can get around 20,000,000 pageviews a day. With shared Batcache and HyperDB (which you already used, nice) it’s a lot easier to scale out both the web and database tier independently as needed. We haven’t found the upper limit of this strategy yet.”

Included are links to Quantcast’s statistics proving 1 billion page hits per month on wordpress.com (globally): http://www.quantcast.com/p-18-mFEk4J448M/traffic

Link to the Memcache Plugin: http://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/browser/memcached/trunk

Link to the Batcache Plugin: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/batcache/

According to the site:

“Development testing showed a 40x reduction in page generation times: pages generated in 200ms were served from the cache in 5ms. Traffic simulations with Siege demonstrate that WordPress can handle up to twenty times more traffic with Batcache installed.”

Based on Quantcast statistics, Drupal.org ranks 13,298 overall while WordPress.org ranks #11. Global tracking statistics are not available for drupal.org on the site.

http://www.quantcast.com/drupal.org

This is a post from Web Dev News, a site brought to you by Xavisys Web Development. Mullenweg: Scale WordPress to 20,000,000 Views per Day for $100 p/month