How to add database intensive pages that are scalable?

  • I am looking for some community advice on how to proceed with a major web site overhaul where we are moving to WordPress as our web site framework.

    My organization is converting a large web site to use wordpress as a complete web site framework. Most of the conversion is straight forward, but there are a very few pages (couple dozen) which receive 99% of the hits. These pages are written in php and perform database queries, and get hit many times per second. There are numerous interlinked php libraries involved in this existing code and it is fairly complex. What is the appropriate approach to ensure that these pages will operate efficiently within the new wordpress framework, and be scalable in general?

    Some ideas/questions:
    (“page” refers to a generic web page, whereas “Page” refers to the wordpress Page mechanism)
    1. Reuse the code from the existing web site and place it outside of wordpress. How do I add the look-and-feel (header, menus, footer) from wordpress to the resulting pages?
    2. Create wordpress Pages for each page, linking to the existing libraries. Where would those libraries reside? Perhaps in a new plugin of my own creation?
    3. Should I be concerned about the added overhead of running pages with such a high server load through wordpress as opposed to having them be standalone?
    4. I want to implement a caching mechanism for the most common queries (fetching the data once and creating a cached html page which is sent rather than the php page). Is this sort of html caching easily implemented using Pages within wordpress?
    5. Why can I find no documentation or examples of people doing something similar? Is it simply too difficult or am I just not looking in the right places? ??

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • Thread Starter thejester

    (@thejester)

    Should I assume from the lack of response that what I’m trying is out of the realm of possibility? Surely someone has at least tried. It would be great to get some solid advice from the WordPress community on this, but any pointers to resources or even stories of people who’ve tried would be useful. Thanks!

    What I did was use PHP inclusion and create the Pages manually with the link to the PHP file that created the content. There’s another PHP execution plugin, but I don’t think it lets you just include a file (though it may, I didn’t look).

    Going down route 2 I think would be a bad idea, though I haven’t tried it.

    No. WordPress is fairly fast and clean. If you use WP-SuperCache (or something by that title), you can survive even Digg hits.

    I think people are just starting to get into accomplishing this with WordPress. My problem, and yours, is that after you create the 12 Pages that get 99% of your hits, how do you get the other 1000 Pages setup easily? Create 12 (or 45 in my case) Pages easily, without manually going through and creating them. I was looking for a way to do that when I came across your post.\

    I hope this helps. Good luck.

    MECU, have you been able to do this? I have spent quite a bit of time on this over the past few weeks and would be happy to trade war stories.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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