A petition is a write-heavy site with a public number on the front of it. Both halves fail at exactly the same moment — when it starts spreading.
Most sites read far more than they write. A petition inverts that, and it inverts it during a traffic spike.
When a petition spreads, most arriving visitors submit rather than browse. Capacity is planned for writes, which is a different shape from serving cached pages.
A petition's credibility rests on its number. Repeat submissions and automated ones are rejected at the edge, before they become rows somebody has to defend.
The total is on every page and changes constantly. It is served from a maintained figure rather than counted from the table on each request.
Names, postcodes and email addresses given in support of a cause are sensitive by context. Storage and export are handled accordingly.
A petition ends by being handed over. The export has to be complete and reproducible, including at a point in time after signing has closed.
A petition does not get gradually popular. It is shared somewhere and takes a year of signatures in an afternoon, all of them writes to the same table.
The number that matters is whether a submission completes while thousands of other people are submitting the same form.
The read-heavy assumptions behind most WordPress tuning are wrong here, and the public number makes correctness a credibility question.
| Setting | What we do | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Capacity shape | Planned for write throughput rather than cached reads | When a petition spreads most arrivals submit instead of browsing, which is the opposite of the traffic profile page caching is designed for. |
| Submission filtering | Duplicates and automated signatures rejected at the edge | The total is the petition's entire claim, so a number inflated by repeat and scripted submissions is worse than a smaller honest one. |
| Counter source | Read from a maintained figure, not counted per request | The total appears on every page and changes constantly, and counting a growing table on each view makes popularity into a slowdown. |
| Signatory storage | Handled as personal data given in a political context | A name and postcode attached to a cause is more sensitive than the same fields on an order, and the storage decisions should reflect that. |
| Handover export | Reproducible at a point in time after closing | A petition is delivered to a recipient, and the export has to be defensible later rather than a snapshot nobody can reproduce. |
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