WordPress Bug ? Problems with large number of posts

is there a maximum number of posts ?

In reality no. In theory, it runs into the millions.

in reality NO ? that was not what i’ve been asking ! i am asking WHY is it crashing with over 30.000 posts ? you gave me the same response on another topic . that’s not what i am asking ! WordPress has a big problem with large number of posts,and it seems NOBODY cares ! i thought WordPress it’s better than this ! i feel sorry i choosed it over Joomla !

Define “crashes”. You say that as if it has some kind of universal meaning.

WordPress can scale to any number of posts. But maybe something else on your system can’t. MySQL may be setup wrong, for example.

You’re not giving anywhere near enough information for anybody to diagnose the problem.

WordPress uses an unsigned bigint(20) to store the post ID, so the theoretical maximum is 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 posts. That’s 18 quintillion (10^18).

In reality, there are other factors that you need to take into consideration – such as your web & MySQL servers.

Thanks for the replies.
by ‘crashes’ i mean the server is overloading when i hit the Publish button,and get stuck (goes ‘down’ ) .This problems appeared only after i reached 30.000 posts,not before.
I can’t find any documentation about what settings i should make to mysql in order for WordPress to function properly.

Maybe somebody knows ? or can give a url ?

thanks

vyperlook – have you found a solution to your problem? It’s rather clear that the other posters are merely giving you theoretical numbers that, if you had 50 high end supercomputers running in parallel, could handle those number of pages pretty well. However, real world performance limits generally take place at a certain number of posts for the typical, current, dedicated server.

I was wondering what you found out and would be interested in hearing if you have.

Indeed. I’m running into a very similar issue. The mysql database seems to be taking an incredibly long time to return results, and eventually times out. I’m not sure it’s the same number limit at above (which might be related to the default configuration that apt-get installs) but one blog with over 300k posts is totally useless at this point, while another with just over 30k is painfully slow.

The physical size of the 300k post database is over 800MB, which seems pretty big in one sense, but small when compared to other database projects (non-wordpress) I’ve worked on.

I did locate this wordpress bug report which seems to describe the issue I’m having at least.

https://core.trac.www.ads-software.com/ticket/16706

If anyone finds a clean solution please post it here.

yes, wordpress is not good with many posts.
but, you can also check your plugins.most of them have poor coding, so you will run into trouble sooner or later.
after i disabled the plugin XML Sitemap, the load decreased.That plugin is causing major problems if you have a big number of posts.
But even without it, you’ll still have problems.so you better keep your wordpress with fewer posts, and if you can’t wordpress is not the right solution.

@smconner looking at your ticket link, i see that i have similar problems.sorting is taking a huge load on the server. wordpress creates huge tables, and it’s not using indexes properly, at least for some important queries.

@vyperlook that was my conclusion as well. That said I located some stop-gap resources.

In my situation I discovered that the plugin “FeedWordPress” (which aggregates other RSS feeds and whatnot) was aggregating from a “poisoned well“, meaning that someone in the RSS pool was pulling an RSS feed from someone else in the pool, thus creating an infinite loop. Bad news indeed. In the matter of a couple months it turned 684 real articles into over 300,000+ copies of these articles.

It appears that the FeedWordPress plugin has no logic to identify duplicates/copy posts. I think this would be a nice feature to add.

Removing Duplicate Posts
So for me the task became turning off the plugin and clearing out the duplicates posts, as well as the unused wp_postmeta and wp_term_relationships.

Helpful Plugins
WP-Cleanup (will delete unused postmeta but CAN take many hours)
WP-DBManager (helps examine the database and quickly repair/optimize)

Remove duplicate entries / rows a mySQL database table
https://www.justin-cook.com/wp/2006/12/12/remove-duplicate-entries-rows-a-mysql-database-table/

CREATE TABLE new_table as
SELECT * FROM old_table WHERE 1 GROUP BY [column to remove duplicates by];
DROP TABLE old_table;
RENAME TABLE new_table TO old_table;

How To Clean WordPress Database
https://www.allguru.net/web/how-to-clean-wordpress-database

DELETE FROM wp_term_relationships
WHERE NOT EXISTS (
SELECT * FROM wp_posts
WHERE wp_term_relationships.object_id = wp_posts.ID
);

Remove duplicate / unused postmeta through mysql command line
DELETE pm
FROM wp_postmeta pm
LEFT JOIN wp_posts wp ON wp.ID = pm.post_id
WHERE wp.ID IS NULL;

I’m still cranking on one of the three databases, cleaning up duplicates, and it’s taking forever, so much so that I have to stop apache2 at night run the command line mysql commands and then kill it in the morning, restart apache2, repair the tables and then do it all over the next night… I’ve been doing that for two nights in a row and it is only about half way done by my estimation.