Coding Horror: ‘Behold WordPress, Destroyer of CPUs’

Jeff Atwood on the out-of-the-box performance of WordPress:

I’m not alone; just do a web search on WordPress CPU usage or WordPress Digg Effect and you’ll find page after page of horror stories, most (all?) of which are solved by the swift and judicious application of the WP-Cache plugins.

It’s not like this is a new issue. Personally, I think it’s absolutely irresponsible that WP-Cache like functionality isn’t already built into WordPress. I would not even consider deploying WordPress anywhere without it. And yet, according to a recent podcast, Matt Mullenweg dismisses it out of hand and hand-wavingly alludes to vague TechCrunch server reconfigurations.

It’s baffling that a default WordPress installation doesn’t offer any caching. Almost every time I knock a site offline by linking to it from DF, it’s a WordPress site without caching.

★ Wednesday, 23 April 2008