Wednesday, Apr 30, 2008    Text size: 

Jeff Atwood of CodingHorror.com offered a full analysis of how a Wordpress-powered blog interacts with its database and makes use of its computers central-processing unit, or CPU.

Atwood tested out Wordpress on a pair of simple blogs with a minimum of traffic, and he tracked their CPU usage, only to find the usage spike when the computer had to deal with a Wordpress blog. To see a graph of his results, click here.

"This is an incredibly scary result," Atwood wrote." [My test blog] is getting, at best, a moderate trickle of incoming traffic. It's barely linked anywhere. With that kind of CPU load level, this site would fall over instantaneously if it got remotely popular or, God forbid, anywhere near the front page of a social bookmarking website. For a bare-bones blog which is doing approximately nothing, this is a completely unacceptable result. It's appalling."

Atwood noted that he was running the blog from a top-of-the-line Windows PC.

For adult webmasters who look to Wordpress' popular platform for their blogging needs, there are multiple solutions and all of them seek to curtail the number of times a Wordpress blog dips into its database.

Atwood himself recommended three plugins to help with this problem: WP-Cache, WP-Super-Cache and Bad Behavior.

Online guru Brandon Shalton agreed with Atwood's assessment of Wordpress' shortcomings and solutions, though Shalton added that Wordpress isn't the only program that has this problem. LiveJournal suffered from similar problems, as do all sites that use the popular, open-source database solution MySQL, Shalton said.

"It's too easy to use the database as a crutch, which is what a lot of programmers are doing when they make all their calls to the database," said Shalton, who founded the traffic analysis service T3Report.com.

But despite Atwood's complaints about its functionality, the popular blogger did praise Wordpress for its ease of use and sheer ubiquity. Adult webmasters may want to take notice, especially now that Smut.com has launched a free-hosted blogging service that runs on Wordpress.