Thread: Will Cassipress really scale?

Will Cassipress really scale?

I really want to use Cassipress for my core framework but I'm trying to make sure its going to scale. Especially seeing we are going to be leveraging my long time listings of 1.2 million listings right out of the gate. This project is all part of an older out of date severely broken website we are creating with a new name and brand. The old site was completely custom built at one time had over 20k vistors a day. Today only about 700 to 1000. We are going to be redirecting to the new site and I'm trying to figure out all the parts for Classipress to make this work. But I need to know if its going to scale. I have heard many pros and cons as it relates to scaling. I really want to stay with WordPress as the core for many reasons I will be implementing.

We do not want to go down the fully custom coding again because of time and expense and it seems resources always come and go making it difficult to maintain.

Also if you could provide a couple resources that would be able to make custom tweaks we need would be great.


While they have some valid talk. The reality is we do not know what kind of hardware config was for the old site. We also do not know if the hardware config was beefed up for the new config. Therefore I have no true system design here to base an opinion on. Many times especially with how cheap hardware is today software bottlenecks can be overcome with hardware.


Thanks

Zorro...

This is really more about whether or not WordPress itself can handle the kind of load you're talking about, and there are certainly many blog posts about this kind of thing if you search Google. You can find useful information in this WordPress Codex documentation, and since you specifically mention hardware:

In terms of data being imported into our themes, you can also find information regarding importing large files into our themes here. Customization information can be found in the AppThemes Developer Center. Thanks.

Will Cassipress really scale?

Actually its not about if WP can scale. I found a posting from a very popular classipress member here on another site that switched to a different product because they claim it did not scale. He said that classipress stores everything in a single table because of WordPress. That's fine if you only change the data occasionally (like in a blog). However on a very large classifieds site you have to do a lot of inserts (for new items as they are posted by users) and a lot of querying to show and sort results. With everything in a single table, people doing inserts might have to compete with people reading the information and that can cause a problem. According to the author he had a problem at the 400,000 listing mark. It's true that using faster hardware can solve many problems, but a bad architecture can also undo the effect of faster hardware.

I need classipress to provide references that are successfully using it over the couple million mark. If not then anyone building any site with Classipress that has potential to grow would get to a point of no return. Otherwise its only going to work for small mom and pop or local style classifieds sites and needs to be marketed accordingly.

This is not a WP question as we all know WP can scale. This is a direct question for Classipress. My site will start out with million plus listings. I need to know if it was designed correctly to scale? And if not what are the interim and future plans to make it scale.

Zorro.....

As you've outlined, and as is mentioned in the post you refer to, this does ultimately go back to WordPress's capabilities because ClassiPress uses the WordPress database tables. This is simply how the theme is designed to function. The customer who made the post didn't just switch from one WordPress theme to another due to inefficiencies of ClassiPress, he went with an entirely different platform to WordPress. Personally, I think considering the actual price you pay for a ClassiPress license, being able to successfully grow a business using WordPress/ClassiPress over 2-3 years as our customer did, is actually very good.

I'm not sure we can provide you with the references you are seeking in terms of a million+ ClassiPress site, because not all AppThemes customers choose to feature their sites in our showcase, therefore we aren't aware of what the biggest site may be. There are no immediate plans for changes to the way in which the theme works with WordPress, specifically in terms of the database tables. Thanks.

Will Cassipress really scale?

Basically I think you did indirectly answer my question saying that since its cheap, you can't complain escalation point And if you had a big customer using it, I'm sure there would be happy to brag about it. I think this one would hit a brick wall eventually…

I love the product based on my review and its a great looking product for small mom and pop site or local community classifieds. But based on my extensive research and QA its clearly not the product for me if I am going to be be growing a large site.

Zorro......

Thanks for the feedback, and best of luck with your project - I hope you can find the solution you're looking for with WordPress as your desired platform :)