Scaling WordPress for High-Traffic
videos

Scaling WordPress for High-Traffic

on Mar 1st 2011 with 64 comments
Tutorial Details

Just because you didn’t get to go to that awesome conference doesn’t mean that you can’t still watch the lectures! Each week, we feature one recommended web development lecture on Nettuts+.

This talk, presented by Envato’s very own developer extraordinaire, Ryan Allen, will detail some of the potential pitfalls and solutions when maintaining massive WordPress blogs, like Tuts+.

Please note that Ryan has a unique (but hilarious) sense of humor.

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Ryan is a software developer and all-round crazy person from Melbourne, Australia. He's been working for Envato since it's inception in February 2006, fancy that! He likes long walks on the beach, pianos, and object literals. He's currently having a minor affair with JavaScript. Don't tell anyone.  

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  • http://jakswebdesign.com Adam

    Awesome! Needed this info for a big project we’ve got coming up. Thanks!

  • http://ahermosilla.com Andres Hermosilla

    Linking to a deleted video is definitely a unique sense of humor!

    • http://ahermosilla.com Andres Hermosilla

      Works now!

  • Robert

    Aren’t domains with wordpress in it forbidden according to M.M or are Semi-educational sites an exception?

    • http://envato.com Ryan Allen
      Author

      Yep WordPress doesn’t like you using wordpress in a domain name, I didn’t realise this, but it’s been sorted out, the site is at http://scalingwp.com/.

  • http://www.lastrose.com LastRose

    This guy is hilarious!
    Would love to see more of him.
    Maybe give him a new tuts+ site on some of the subjects he’s covering?

    • http://envato.com Ryan Allen
      Author

      I’ll be posting information to http://scalingwp.com/, which is likely to eventually become a proper Envato site, follow @scalingwp on Twitter to find out when things are posted!

  • “Cooldude”

    I understand his jokes (Internet addiction FTW)

  • http://www.patrickkivits.com Patrick Kivits

    He must be on 4chan for like 24/7 with that kind of humor :)

  • http://www.wpdestek.com Tufan

    That’s a helpful presentation. Thanks!

  • http://twitter.com/collis Collis Ta’eed
    Staff

    Awesome talk Ryan!!! :-) Really funny and enjoyable to watch, even a second time here on the site :-)

    • http://envato.com Ryan Allen
      Author

      Thanks Collis!

    • Ryan

      Are you seriously paying this moron a salary? He’s beneath clueless.

  • http://newarts.at Drazen Mokic

    Very nice Talk, incredibly useful, thanks

  • http://jaredeasterday.com Jiert

    Awesome, thanks Ryan!

    I have what might be a dumb question that I didn’t hear you talk about: Are you using WordPress MU then for your envato sites?

    Signed up for the google group, and will be checking back with scalingwordpress.com often.

    • http://envato.com Ryan Allen
      Author

      G’day!

      The answer to your question is: nope. We have separate WordPress installations for each and every blog. I believe that once upon a time we tried WPMU but for some reason or another we didn’t end up using it (I have no idea what that was!).

      Though at WordCamp NZ and Melbourne there were quite a few people talking about having used it and that they were getting a lot out of it.

  • Daniel

    Is it possable for me to download the video for offline viewing?

  • Nate

    This is suppose to by funny. Sorry but I find your jokes to be like poop jokes–cheap, useless, and require little thought. I can’t believe a credible site like the Evanto network would post something so vulgar and pedestrian.

    Question for you, if it’s that much of hassle given a short presentation, why bother? No one is threatening you, are they?

    “I don’t care__fill_in_the_blank” — Why are you giving a presentation? I don’t get it. Is this suppose to be the cool thing to say? What’s going on?

    Allen, do you know how to give a presentation?!

    • http://envato.com Ryan Allen
      Author

      I’m sorry you didn’t like my jokes! And yes, sometimes I can be a vulgar pedestrian. Just the other day I flipped the bird at some guy because he failed to give way to me at a crossing.

      In answer to your questions; presenting was unthreateningly hassle-free and relatively straight forward. My Mum thinks I’m cool. There’s nothing to worry about. You’re welcome!

      • RandomNotMomGuy

        I liked it.

      • Nate

        So from your sarcastic remarks, we can derive that:

        1) You think it’s cool to say things like “I don’t care…” or comments that suggest an absolute disinterest in what you are doing. In your case an absolute disinterest in the presentation thus you suggest something like “Good, I don’t have to answer questions at the end”. I lack the energy to go back and quote verbatim; but I don’t think it will add any value because instances like these can be found throughout the presentation.

        2) You think it’s acceptable behavior to move around the stage maniacally or a much better comparison, like a little child in a candy store.

        3) You think using profane gestures is the only way to get your feelings across.

        4) Instead of admitting that your style of presenting was unprofessional, you are arguing for the validity and defending your style. Consider this example: if the president or prime minister of your country makes a speech in the fashion that you did, how well do you think it would fair with the general populous?

        …am I correct?

      • http://envato.com Ryan Allen
        Author

        Aw, you’re no fun. You’re not invited to my party anymore.

      • http://www.jeffrey-way.com Jeffrey Way

        Nate – I think you’re being a little harsh here.

        And let’s make it clear that we’re talking about WordCamp – not a Presidential address. I, for one, appreciated the humor.

        Be nice.

      • Nate

        @R. Allen
        HAHAHA. I like your spirit. :)

    • Fez

      I loved his jokes. I usually loose interest in most lectures but because of his little jokes I was able to relate to him on a somewhat personal level and that kept me interested in what he had to say. At the end of the day I learnt a few new things and had a good laugh in the process. That’s the best way to learn imho :D.

      Good Work Ryan – I’m signing up for the googlegroup!

    • http://nvmind.com Ignacio

      I liked this presentation, we actually need more humor in presentations,
      keeps you fresh and interested.

      Maybe you should loosen up a bit Nate, are you a lawyer or something?, this is a place
      for creative people not straight, squares.

      Whatever work you do, try to break the rules once in a while, you’ll feel better.

      good luck

  • http://www.lb-digital.com Lee Borowiak

    Nice one Ryan, very interesting to see how the huge traffic is managed. Hope it’s not too stressful for you!

    Lee.

    • http://envato.com Ryan Allen
      Author

      OMG LEE BOROWIAK!!! I haven’t seen you in years! It’s not stressful until things stop working :)

  • http://portusbhub.com Rahul

    A good humorous and useful video. Some Doggy Images were quite funny.

  • http://www.sgdoeschwitz.de Grün Weiss

    nice, thx

  • http://www.seosheffield.org Ed Baxter

    I for one loved the video. Ryan, you mentioned a Google group in your video, could you post a link please. I can’t seem to find it :)

  • chris

    i cant wait for scalingwp to go live with the posts about the large page views on a single server.

  • http://mclear.co.uk John McLear

    I wrote & did a video about how we did this a few weeks back

    http://blog.primaryt.co.uk/2011/02/15/what-technology-we-use-on-primaryblogger/

    • http://envato.com Ryan Allen
      Author

      Oh cool! Thanks for posting that, I’ll check it out!

  • http://twitter.com/eddihughes eddihughes

    This, he speaks truths.

  • http://thefinishedbox.com tfbox

    Great video, really enjoyable. Entertaining too.

  • Tim Armstrong

    I live in wellington. Trust me the hills aren’t that special!

  • http://www.adevtus.com Valentin

    Stupid question: What’s the name of the font used in the presentation?

  • http://screamingcodemonkey.com Jeffry Ghazally

    Excellent! Ha just as funny third time around ;)
    Thanks for the tips! As fond of bananas as I am the Mailing list is going bananas so i am going to have to jump ship, can you pretty please post some of the answers from the mailing list onto the scalingwp site?
    Most notably I’d like to hear about the preferred Plugins for CDN, and how you optimized Google Site map.. simple things but worth having them up for those w short term memory :)

    best
    Jeff

  • http://www.wilwaldon.com william waldon

    informative talk was informative. I enjoyed your presentation, it was a great look at the back end of the wordpress situation you guys run. I’m glad you did it all for the lawls.

  • http://www.colinjmorgan.com Colin Morgan

    Thanks for the presentation Ryan. I’m currently developing for a high traffic client and definitely notice a lack of information on using WordPress for high end commercial websites. We are currently doing an investigation into “optimizing” our WP builds. I’ll recommend your video to the people involved.

    p.s I would love to see a good lecture or post on appropriate use of queries to minimize server load. hint hint Jeffrey.

  • http://www.unsalkorkmaz.com Ünsal Korkmaz

    I bet he plays WoW !

  • http://www.iflexion.com/ website programmers

    Very useful presentation. Nate, i think that you are correct :)

  • http://htmlpress.net/ Ed

    Thanks for the video. Time to revisit my google XML Sitemap plugin.

  • Darwin

    Great video Rayn,

    it would be great if you could provide a link to that wp-plugin that you have developed for caching.

    one more thing , is Memcached (or any other php accelerators ) are part of the scaling process.?:)

  • jens

    You said you used git to maintain and keep control over the code, what script/program do you use for this?

  • http://www.newwordpresstheme.net/ Kevin

    Awesome presentation. That help me much to make my wp sites perform faster. Thanks :)

  • http://www.yourdigitalspace.com Swamykant

    Nice presentaton:)

  • http://www.costume-ideas.com Alex

    Very good presentation, although a bit hard to understand for non-english speakers due to the fast speaking and heavy accent of Ryan, with interesting details i haven’t known yet.

  • http://www.howtogetridpimplefast.com/ john smith

    This is awesome stuff i recently launch a WP site this video is extremely helpful for me..I learnt a lot from here and bookmark your great site and will come back soon::))

  • http://www.tipsdb.com Renee

    Long video but nice presentation! Btw, scalingwp.com is down right now? I can’t access it.

  • http://namthanh.vn ve may bay

    Very good presentation, although a bit hard to understand for non-english speakers due

  • http://www.jeteye.com/user/YLInternetMarketing local marketing

    I tend not to leave a response, but after reading a few of the remarks on this page Scaling WordPress for High-Traffic | Nettuts+. I actually do have some questions for you if it’s okay. Could it be only me or does it look like some of these remarks come across like they are left by brain dead individuals? :-P And, if you are writing at other online sites, I’d like to follow you. Could you post a list of every one of your shared pages like your linkedin profile, Facebook page or twitter feed?

  • http://dreamforsmile.com gaurav kumar

    appericiable lectures….i like it. please give some ideas for backlinks and traffics.

  • Evan Driscoll

    Thanks for sharing your experience on the subject. For me, the video was a good introduction.

    Also, I liked “baby got backups”.

  • http://anacondawebhosting.com Francisco

    What a nice video! thanks

  • http://www.yoloy.com Loy Lee

    Great presentation. Took lots and lots away from it.

    What’s happend to http://www.scalingwp.com :(

  • http://CLUSTERfoo.com Noam Gagliardi

    A lot of great information, but I wish youd’ve stuck to two or three key topics and expanded more instead of jumping from one thing to the next. This was too much to cover in under an hour.

  • Ryan

    This guy just makes me facepalm. An adult on his first trip “overseas”. Gynocomastia. Awful sense of humour. Utterly clueless about engineering.

    But the worst….dick swinging about PHP and WordPress. Instantly lost all credibility.

  • http://www.vickyz.com/ abhishek

    just loved this :)

  • dai ly Tam Vuong

    So beauty and funy. This is a site for relax very good

  • Rasel khan

    Please link me your PSD-to-WP video tuttorials