How to configure WordPress to handle 75,000 pages?

I have a large site that’s using WordPress. We have 75,000 pages in the site so far, and it’s performing well on the front-end.

The issue is that if anyone on our team touches the page editor (wp-admin/edit.php?post_type=page), Apache eats up all the memory on the server.

I’ve tried disabling all plugins, but that didn’t work. I also tried debugging on our live server which a 4GB box… it still eats up all the memory and comes to a hault.

On this install, we also have 20,000 posts. There’s no issue loading those in wp-admin. Maybe we should move all pages to posts – that’s going to cause an issue with permalink structure, though.

Are there special settings or configurations I’m missing for a large WP site?

1

The problem comes from the fact that, in order to display pages and their hierarchy, WP has to load all of them and then build the tree in memory.

So, you are saved if you can convert most of those pages into one or several non-hierarchical custom post types.

The permalink structure can be emulated.

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