Behold WordPress, Destroyer of CPUs

From Behold WordPress, Destroyer of CPUs:

I'm not alone; just do a web search on WordPress CPU usage or WordPress Digg Effect and you'll find page after page of horror stories, most (all?) of which are solved by the swift and judicious application of the WP-Cache plugins.

It's not like this a new issue. Personally, I think it's absolutely irresponsible that WP-Cache like functionality isn't already built into WordPress. I would not even consider deploying WordPress anywhere without it. And yet, according to a recent podcast, Matt Mullenweg dismisses it out of hand and hand-wavingly alludes to vague TechCrunch server reconfigurations.

As a former user of WordPress¹, I can't believe that WordPress still doesn't have caching built-in.

A few commenters hit the nail on the head:

If you think WordPress is polished software then you probably haven't read much of the actual code, tried to write plugins, or themes. It's just another giant messy PHP hack.

The advantage of WP of course is that it works well, and it has more plugins and themes and features and users than the others.

I couldn't have said it better myself — I wrote a plugin or two for WordPress, it wasn't fun.

1. Switched to Drupal into 2006 because of how slow WordPress was… [↩]