Is having thousands of unique categories a concern?

Question

I'm in the process of creating a lyrics website using WordPress. Each post consists of a song, and I figured for ease to make each category represent the song artist.

With this in mind, the site will be host to many many posts and likely thousands of different categories. I've heard rumors that not necessarily the posts but having that many unique categories can affect the speed of the site. Is this true, or should I be using some custom field solution to represent song artists?

Thanks!

Answer 1

I've worked with sites that have thousands of categories and over 20K post tags. This really doesn't deal with WordPress capability per se as much as server capacity and capability.

Here's what I would recommend:

1. Install the W3TC Plugin
2. Install memcached on your server
3. Set W3TC to use object caching via memcached - you will need to define your server and memcached port
4. Boost your server memory via php.ini

These are preliminary steps to creating a more enterprise environment for your WordPress installation. If server-side caching doesn't meet the needs of your traffic, you might want to look at a third-party caching service as well.

Answer 2

You're going to need a VPS or private server with a MySQL server that's all your own to handle the database traffic. A $6 month shared hosting account will die under the load, even with a cache and the usual performacne tweaks. Start with a $50/month real VPS from a web host that offers scalability.

That said, any Content Management System - like Drupal, Joomla, etc. - has overhead, and must he backed up with hardware to handle the amount of content. But I doubt you will be able to administer a site like that without a CMS.