amznVibe - 9:10 pm on Mar 22, 2008 (gmt 0)

I have a wordpress site with over 1,000 articles and as long as you have a decent mysql cache and are using a php opcode cache (eaccelerator, xcache, etc) there is very little overhead. Dynamic pages are created in less than 0.150 second on a VPS. The search feature on wordpress leaves a great deal to be desired but not because of speed - it's because of lack of features. Fortunately there are third party plugins that can solve that. The new tag (vs just category) feature built in to versions after 2.3 is quite powerful for organizing things too.

Using wp-super-cache for wordpress (just google it) you can have thousands of simultaneous connections to your server without impossible loads. Super-cache (the successor to wp-cache2) compiles the pages literally to static html files (transparently) that are then served directly via htaccess internal redirects without php or mysql being used at all. Then you have the best of both worlds, a free, open-source CMS-like program with thousands of plugins available to customize it however you'd like, yet virtually no overhead for visitors (note, that logged in users don't get cached pages).

If you use an apache replacement like litespeed or lighttpd you can also double the capacity of any server over apache1/apache2. But that step may not even be necessary unless you are building some kind of site that is going to be constantly slashdotted/dugg.

[edited by: amznVibe at 9:58 pm (utc) on Mar. 22, 2008]