Comments on: You don’t need to think big just think Smart

By: Dan Milward

Dan Milward — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 22:25:26 +0000

Unfortunatly… nothing is that simple around here :P

There are two things I’m looking forward to in the world of WP. First I’d like bbPress to be easier to integrate with your wordpress Theme. Maybe it should just become a WordPress plugin. And second I’d like hyperDB to be as easy as installing as a plugin.. we could be waiting a while and we might have to build em both.

Just like when I made my first WordPress Plugin wish list 4 or 5 years ago. An e-Commerce plugin was on that list and then one opportunity led to another and we ended up making it!!

By: rich

rich — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 22:06:16 +0000

i was hoping you were going to say it was a streamlined process. But, I should have known better

By: Dan Milward

Dan Milward — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 21:56:40 +0000

Absolutely it is – in fact one day I hope it becomes MU standard practice.

It was not easy and it took us about a week to get right. Let us just say that the HyperDB + WordPress MU documentation is rather lacking. I’m not critisicing though because I know that writing documentation is a big job in its own right.

So it was not just installing HyperDB that took us time. It was writing code to split up the database in a HyperDB friendly way once we got HyperDB installed, it was backing up files, it was upgrading MU in the first place because HyperDB does not work with MU 2.6.1 and a range of other little chores.

I’m glad we did it though!!!

By: rich

rich — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 04:24:25 +0000

how was that implementation process for you guys? I haven’t really looked into it. Is it something that should be considered for all mu installations?

By: Dan Milward

Dan Milward — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 01:16:45 +0000

We just finished implementing the “HyperDB” step and GetShopped runs significantly faster. Now we just need to figure out how to make HyperDB compatible with the “upgrade sites” function so that all of our users are running the latest version of WordPress MU.

By: Dan Milward

Dan Milward — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 02:02:01 +0000

Update: We have not used ngnix ourselves. This is mostly because we don’t have much time – therefore I can not put my hand on my heart and give you an honest answer. At the time it was easier to load balance using S3 for our images.

I’m sure there are other readers who can tell us more about Ngnix and whether or not it is fast on dynamic pages as well as static pages.

One thing we are doing right now though is installing HyperDB to partition all the data. By default WordPress MU creates just one database for all the sites and all the users. The problem with this approach starts to become apprent when you get over 1000 users – you suddendly have one MU site with 1 database that has over 50,000 tables. Put it this way. PhpMyAdmin stopped working :P

So another suggestion. If you are building an MU site and you expect to get more than 1000 + users you may as well use Hyper DB from the start.

By: Dino Delellis

Dino Delellis — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 19:43:54 +0000

Dan, you mentioned ngnix as a replacement for apache? And you mentioned this under the context of the ultimate MU setup, but … you didn’t say why?

If I oogle this term, I see that a few others have mentioned it being fast too but was that your reason for including it in the discussion for the ultimate set up?

And if it’s really fast on static stuff, how about dynamic pages derived from php?

Dino DeLellis

By: Bukmacher

Bukmacher — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 16:18:07 +0000

wordpres MU is what i am looking for, thanks

By: Boonika

Boonika — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 09:25:55 +0000

This sounds good:)

By: Dan Milward

Dan Milward — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 03:47:59 +0000

Hi Rich.

Please email dan [@] instinct.co.nz for a chat. I’d love to talk to you some more about this. We have plans to install buddypress on getshopped.com and perhaps this is something you could help us with… in terms of why and how we should best implement it.

Ciao,

Dan