Hacker News Reader

Comment by geertj | Hacker News Reader

(PMT on the EFS team).

Yes, the wordings are carefully formulated as they have to be signed off by the AWS legal team for obvious reasons. With that said, this update was driven by profiling real applications and addressing the most common operations, so the benefits are real. For example, a simple WordPress "hello world" is now about 2x as fast as before.

View on HN

> For example, a simple WordPress "hello world" is now about 2x as fast as before.

Before seeing this announcement, someone at work today literally said "the wordpress site is feeling very fast today, I wonder if anything has changed?" Great work!

If you don't mind me asking, why do you run Wordpress off of EFS rather than EBS?

EFS allows you to connect to the filesystem from multiple web front-end machines. Doing the same with EBS would require you to manage some sort of clustered filesystem, or run a separate storage tier server.

So you are using it for shared files and user-generated files, not database? Instead of S3?

Wordpress Plugins are stored both in the filesystem and in the database and need to match. Same for the Wordpress Core when an update occurs as WP updates the PHP files locally for the upgrade process. The AWS guidance for a multi-webserver Wordpress setup has included EFS for this reason for years now. You can store uploaded media in S3, but that is a performance optimization that doesn't solve the previous issues.

So you mean the plugins' code, I see, thanks!

Not OP but the obvious use case for Wordpress is the install directory itself. Deploy to one server and have all servers sharing the EFS get the update at the same time.

So PHP rereads the source files on every request? Interesting.

There's a cache. Even if you have to restart some process or purge some cache, this setup makes sense to me for applications that can update their own code (e.g. install/update plugins).

Current SLA is only on uptime: https://aws.amazon.com/efs/sla/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com