Scaling WordPress using Google App Engine and Google Cloud SQL

Question

We need to use WordPress for a site that is going to have high traffic. We expect an initial load of 500K page views a month and will increase to about 8M page views a month. Usage will be mainly during working time, which is around 20 days a month during 8 hours.

We are thinking on using Google App Engine with Google Cloud SQL. We were wondering how well it scales for that kind of load. Theory says Google App Engine should scale automatically, but not sure how good is Google Cloud SQL when scaling. This will be a mostly read database, which a few writes.

So the questions are:

• Does anyone has experience deploying WordPress on Google App Engine + Google Cloud SQL with a high load?
• Do you know if there are problem installing plugins for WordPress on Google App Engine? Do they need any especial modification?

Answer 1

To save you some time, look to other solutions.

I'm working on this exact task now, but I'm about to give up due to Cloud SQL's very poor performance. It might work fine for websites like Orane's, but for larger more complex websites the high latency and slow response time from Cloud SQL means for us 3 second load times instead of 0.7s that we have on our VPS. I have tested by connecting to both IP and Socket, SSL and without, and it's just not usable as-is. If you test with Amazon RDS, the difference in speed is shocking.

The only other solution we've been able to come up with is to set up an API server that continously caches data to memcache and only serve static pages on App Engine with most dynamic content loading through AJAX. Scary!

Keep trying, but you'd be better off looking into RackSpace Cloud DB or Amazon RDS.

Answer 2

There are no problems at all and it doesn't need any modifications. Everything works perfectly and from previous projects I've done on appengine, I know it scales extremely well. I've just set up my new wordpress blog on appengine here and everything works the same but loads a lot faster. Its a little tricky to get setup however..I'm working on a tutorial for that.