The Joys of Wordpress

Ben Goldacre's Bad Science blog can be a fascinating read. It has but one problem.

Every time there are more people drawn to it than usual, it goes down in a blaze of MySQL errors. This is because it's using Wordpress, a blogging engine which insists on assembling each article from data in a database each time it's requested. While this is okay for a small blog, and there are a few, heavily optimised, large-scale examples, it really isn't ideal. I used to use Wordpress at one time, and if, for any reason, a large number of people visited my blog at about the same time, the whole thing slowed significantly.

I really don't understand the popularity of Wordpress, though. Whenever you happen across a blog which has gone down due to excessive load, it's almost always Wordpress. This is, I suspect, because Wordpress is about the only mainstream solution to opt for generation on every request, with no caching. Most others work by generating static files, or, in the case of Blogger, working through Google magic. While a site serving static files will slow down under great load, it is far less likely to stop.

(Update: investigation of MySQL query oddities here.)