Would You Guess These Sites Use WordPress?

[Business Attorney]

Just curious, but when you talk about Drupal and Wordpress running on a "large website" what does that mean to the uninitiated? 1,000 page views an hour? 1,000 a minute? I assume that 100,000 a month which only comes out to about 2 page views a minute on average (obviously more during peak periods) would not be a problem unless they were unusally large pages (obviously not talking about audio, video or software downloads, just fairly normal web pages).

[rezzy]

When I say large website, I am thinking large amount of pages and page views. Although, I think Wordpress and any CMS could work, as your site gets larger and more users start coming, the code may not be concise enough to complete everything in an efficient manner.

For instance, when someone gets Digged and they have Wordpress, because of the all the database interactions, it can bring a shared hosting to its knees. Because of this, cache plugins have been created to lessen the burden on the server.

[vangogh]

David I was thinking more in terms of number of pages when I talked about a large site. I don't know that I could give you an exact number of pages, but I was thinking somewhere above the 10,000 page line.

The site I recently saw switching to WordPress was probably about that size or even bigger. I wish I could remember the site. I'll see if I can collect some large sites currently using WordPress.

With the pageview issues that could have as much to do with your hosting account as with the application. All of the CMSs we're talking about have to connect to a database to present content, which takes processing power. There's a plugin for WordPress called super cache which will serve a cached version of your content to alleviate the processing power needed for your site. Even though a CMS driven site is dynamic, most pages within the site are still static and so caching the page and serving the static copy makes the site run smoother. The cache can more easily deal with traffic spikes and then at times it will update itself to get the latest version of the page.