Can WP Support 1000 Pages on a Dedicated Server?

Not sure i can really answer that question myself, but i don’t see why not, i think the issues mainly come along when you start loading heavy plugins and mass amounts of scripts…

If this is a default no frills (i say frills but just mean plugins) install i’d wager it would handle the load no problem.

If you start adding plugin after plugin then the results may differ greatly depending on what said plugin is doing.

And of course depending on how many queries you have per page, and if the heavy pages have alot of activity… there’s not really a conclusive answer because it really depends on what code you introduce to the site, where you place it and if you needlessly create extra queries that put the server under load… any answer right now would only be a theory on any level, though there may be users that run popular and busy sites who can offer some advice in this area.

I’ve read conflicting posts online regarding this topic, but never actually anything of any authority. I’d love to get a “ballpark” answer to this before developing this project further.

Sorry to break it to you, but hire a consultant. This is exactly what they do.

Web forums aren’t consultants. Posters here have no stake on getting your project to succeed.

I hope this helps.

t31os_ offered: Not sure I can really answer that question myself, but i don’t see why not, i think the issues mainly come along when you start loading heavy plugins and mass amounts of scripts…

This is what I am leaning towards as well. Having 500+ WP installs under my belt over the past several years, many of them very well trafficked, but using posts instead of pages, I’m simply not convinced that going with pages over posts would cause any further overhead. Rather, I am thinking if anyone is experienced problems it is due to running it on shared hosting or inadequate hardware.

Thanks for your response. Much appreciated.

Pinoy.ca chimed in: Sorry to break it to you, but hire a consultant. This is exactly what they do.

I hardly need a consultant. Rather, I’m asking a question and expecting a generalized response from either users with high traffic sites, moderators, or those with experience using a lot of pages. If you have experience with either, then your opinion matters. Otherwise, your response(s) are irrelevant to the topic. Thanks.

PS: is your username deliberately chosen to troll here for users to your Joomla site?

No, that Joomla site is under construction. The WP blog is somewhere else, has 1,050 articles and gets 100,000 pageviews from 43,000 visits a month. Check me out on Quantcast, if you like.

Now I understand where you are coming from and I wish you good luck and I hope you get responses better than the ‘never actually anything of any authority’ you find elsewhere.

I’m currently using WP SuperCache with a 6-hour expiry time and running the blog on a 1 CPU server. WordPress is a CPU killer. Without SuperCache I was hitting CPU loads of between 5 to 9 for several hours every night. Dual quadcore will be just about enough, I think.

Right now I rigged WP to serve custom pages whenever the visitor enters from a search engine search (That’s 25%-30% of all pageviews), and not serve from cache. If the traffic goes higher I may have to either turn this off or upgrade my hardware.

Please take this only for whatever it’s worth.

I have one site with about 6,000 posts, numerous galleries, and about a dozen pages. It receives in excess of 400,000 unique visitors a month, has a couple of million pages, and uses no cache plugins at all. I am not a fan of many plugins to be honest. This site runs fine a single quadcore box with 8gb of ram — the database is stored on the dedicated SQl box mentioned in my opening post.

The biggest “unofficial” answer I could find on the pages vs. posts topic, was that pages were inherently harder on overhead. Thus, I am thinking if this is the worst case, and the other box works fine handling thousands of posts, then a second box should handle it just as easily, and at worst, would need a second processor.

Thanks for your follow-up.

How many monthly pageviews was that site serving? I want to discuss this with my current host. I’m also curious to know where did someone say Pages are tougher than Posts.

Right now, and consider this is August which is a slow time of the year…

August visits to date: 412,853
August Page Views to Date: 1,239,953

You can add another 25 to 30% to those totals once October kicks in… then it typically stays steady like that thru March.

Regarding the pages part… I found it through a bunch of Google searches, but never anything concrete. here’s a few I just found real fast, although not the ones where this one guy was really saying don’t use WP for anything more than a coupe of hundred pages maximum.

Granted, the following thread is from 2007, but unless there is some sort of definitive response from anyone in the know at WP.org, people like myself will continue to question WP’s suitability as a viable option when compared to others known to handle an excessive amount of pages with relative ease ( Joomla, Drupal, et al). See second last post: 3466097
https://www.webmasterworld.com/content_management/3460261.htm

Concerned as well about the Maximum Pages Limitation
https://www.ads-software.com/support/topic/276154?replies=5

There’s a lot more if you need me to post more.

Also Sprach Der Consultant:

Ok, so without real knowledge of that particular installation, such as how media-rich the content is, here is a very rough estimate:

1) Use more RAM. 8GB sound good.
2) Use dual, or quad, Ethernet controllers, up the speed to 1Gbps from the still-usual 100Mbps.
3) SCSI is nice, and your are right on using the RAID 0 (or 10) to increase speed.
4) remove unused utilities, such as desktop managers.
5) Enable cron for garbage collections (both disk and memory)

Biggest variables remaining:
1) How big is your SQL DB
2) What version SQL
3) What bandwidth to storage (i.e. what SCSI)
4) How many simultaneous connections
5) What firewall(s) are you using, both on the box and at the network level
6) How rich your data is
7) How many comments you get
8) What environmentals (and in particular, temperature,) do you achieve
9) How many JS Calls are you using

I am sure I forgot some data, but for further questions, message me.

Ariel