WordPress is powering more big sites than ever before—The New York Times, TechCrunch, Microsoft, and Facebook all run sites using the CMS. But to run a high traffic WordPress site, you need the right infrastructure and development practices. Join Drew Gorton of Pantheon and Jonathan Wold and Weston Ruter of XWP to learn about the proper architectural patterns for scalable website infrastructure as well as optimizations you should use for a large-scale WordPress implementation. They’ll share best practices and guide you through challenges you may encounter.

1. Scaling for High Traffic Sites

2. Who are we?
Drew Gorton
Director of Agency and
Community Outreach,
Pantheon
Jonathan Wold
Accounts Director,
XWP
Weston Ruter
Technology Director,
XWP

3. Why Scale Matters

4. Today’s Topics
● Page Caching
● Object Caching
● Query Performance
● Algorithm Performance
● Searching for Scale
● Elastic Architecture
● Development and Workflow
● A Real-World Scalable Architecture

5. Page Caching

6. Page Caching

7. Page Caching
Challenges & Takeaways
● Cache TTL and Expiration
● Fragment caching
● Cookies

8. Today’s Topics
● Page Caching
● Object Caching
● Query Performance
● Algorithm Performance
● Searching for Scale
● Elastic Architecture
● Development and Workflow
● A Real-World Scalable Architecture

9. Object Caching
An object cache speeds up PHP
execution time while lessening the
load on the database.

10. Object Cache
Challenges & Takeaways
● Complexity
● Invalidation
● Optimization
● Eviction

11. Today’s Topics
● Page Caching
● Object Caching
● Query Performance
● Algorithm Performance
● Searching for Scale
● Elastic Architecture
● Development and Workflow
● A Real-World Scalable Architecture

12. Query Performance

13. Query
Performance
Challenges & Takeaways
● Query routing
● Replication lag
● Debuggability
● Regressions

14. Today’s Topics
● Page Caching
● Object Caching
● Query Performance
● Algorithm Performance
● Searching for Scale
● Elastic Architecture
● Development and Workflow
● A Real-World Scalable Architecture

15. Algorithm
Performance

16. Today’s Topics
● Page Caching
● Object Caching
● Query Performance
● Algorithm Performance
● Searching for Scale
● Elastic Architecture
● Development and Workflow
● A Real-World Scalable Architecture

17. Searching for Scale
Use a dedicated search index like
Apache Solr or ElasticSearch

18. Searching for
Scale
Challenge & Takeaways
● Overriding WP_Query()
● Index Rebuilds
● Complexity

19. Today’s Topics
● Page Caching
● Object Caching
● Query Performance
● Algorithm Performance
● Searching for Scale
● Elastic Architecture
● Development and Workflow
● A Real-World Scalable Architecture

20. Elastic Architecture
Horizontal Scalability Is the Scalability That Matters

21. Traditional Options
Shared vs VM vs Cluster

22. Traditional Options at Scale
In Real Life

23. Next Generation Architecture
The Same Design, Just Add More

24. Elastic
Architecture
Challenges and Takeaways
● Load balancing
● Shared media
● Consistency

25. Today’s Topics
● Page Caching
● Object Caching
● Query Performance
● Algorithm Performance
● Searching for Scale
● Elastic Architecture
● Development and Workflow
● A Real-World Scalable Architecture

26. Development & Workflow

27. Development & Workflow

28. Development
Workflow
Challenges & Takeaways
● Environmental consistency
● Site configuration
● Local development
● Automation

29. Today’s Topics
● Page Caching
● Object Caching
● Query Performance
● Algorithm Performance
● Searching for Scale
● Elastic Architecture
● Development and Workflow
● A Real-World Scalable Architecture

30. A modern stack:
● Reverse proxy (e.g. Varnish)
● Apache or Nginx
● PHP
● Memcached or Redis
● MySQL and Database
Replication
● ElasticSearch or Solr
● Linux
● Version control (Git)
● CI server

31. If you don’t want to do it all on your own...

32. Learn more on
scalewp.io

33. Questions?
@dgorton
@westonruter
@sirjonathan