[Plugin: Live Blogging] Do not use if your site gets any actual traffic

I don’t think that’s a fair criticism, the plugin has successfully scaled to over several hundred viewers with use of a Meteor server. AJAX updating just doesn’t scale, but that’s not the fault of the plugin – you’ll need to use push technology to scale, which is what Meteor is there for.

Are you using Meteor, or the default updating mode?

Fair enough, then it needs to be said that it can’t be used under heavy traffic without a massive amount of backend overhead.

https://meteorserver.org/installation/

No disrespect, it’s an extensive plugin and from one coder to another I don’t want to start some sort of flame war, I do have a couple of questions.

Does it list anywhere that Meteor is necessary for higher load?

Also, just curious, why did you code it using taxonomy rather than using the post_parent column in the posts table?

Also, why the two postmeta keys liveblog and liveblog_active?

I would like suggest to the author another way to reduce memory consumption on the server:
To save the micro posts of the live blogging, the application could use “mini .xml file” (residing in own server folder) instead of the database table wp_posts.
The plugin will import the content of these “mini .xml files” into the table wp_posts (each micro post on his article), only when the Live Blogging will be closed to further updates.
This workaround reduce the database query and memory consumption. And also improve the plugin integration with others application hooks.

Cheers, ??
Zhenya

msteel: It says Meteor is necessary for “professional bloggers” and that it reduces server load in the FAQ. It was originally only ever Meteor only for exactly that reason, but AJAX was the single most requested feature, which is why it was added in 2.0.

I can’t recall the exact reason I used a taxonomy rather than post_parent, but it’s likely that I didn’t know about post_parent when I first wrote the plugin (which was a number of years ago now). The two postmeta keys are to indicate whether or not a post is a liveblog, and whether or not it’s still active (if it’s not active, the auto-loading code doesn’t get loaded for dead posts, and it doesn’t appear as an active liveblog in the admin interface)

zhenya: Those are valid suggestions, but I deliberately wrote 2.0 to do things the “WordPress way”, so I could take advantage of the admin interface, other plugins, etc…

Chris

How much traffic are you getting? Using polling, I ran a test with 250,000 unique visitors over three hours and saw less than a 10 percent server load.

Recommendations:

1) Use nginx.

2) Use caching for anything that isn’t live.

3) Change the jQuery post request to a get request.

function live_blogging_poll(id)
{
    jQuery.ajax({
        url: live_blogging.ajaxurl,
        cache: false,
        type: 'get',
        data: { action: 'live_blogging_poll', liveblog_id: id },
        success: function(entries) {
            for (entry in entries)
            {
                live_blogging_handle_entry(entries[entry]);
            }
        },
        error: function(xhr,textStatus){
            console.log(textStatus);
        },
        datatype: 'json'
    });
    setTimeout(function(){live_blogging_poll(id)}, 60000)
}

Good point, that POST should really be a GET.

Chris

@yurivictor I’m curious about your setup. I’m running nginx for my server. Are using Meteor and if so, what does your conf file look like?

@midwestkel I’m not using Meteor. I use the polling option.