[cd34]

Having helped a number of wordpress powered sites, Walrus has reached a conclusion that a number of other people have reached.

The issue really isn't with BlogsOrganizer powering the network of sites, but, the fact that wordpress in a high traffic situation does not perform well. Their recent changes to their tables to hold revisions in the main table means that a site that has 1000 articles, each having a minor edit or two, results in a main post table with 3000+ records. Coupled with the fact that wordpress's indexes on that table are less than optimal for the types of queries, and the fact that the tag cloud is created with an utter mess of code, pushing a large amount of traffic through wordpress becomes problematic. wp-cache and wp-super-cache merely delay the inevitable.

A large, high traffic network running on wordpress will melt down with enough traffic. Add in pings and trackbacks and google scanning those 500 posts on 60+ blogs on one machine and you've got 30000 pageviews from Googlebot every week or so. And while googlebot's network will only scan 1 page per domain per bot per minute, if you've got 60 blogs, its hitting wordpress 60 times a minute on top of your normal traffic.

Wordpress was never designed with that type of activity. Neither was Joomla. MovableType writes static files which are infinitely better behaved.

And yes, google likes the default wordpress templates, but, that doesn't mean that it is the best. Their default templates and many of the supplied templates do have coding errors and are not optimal, but, are not too bad.

Walrus, I have another client with similar issues -- he's out of town right now, but, you might want to chat with him. He's about ready to write his own software or contract it out. Perhaps you can collaborate.