WordPress MU

Just signed up for The Plan To End All Plans, and had them enable the wildcard. For some reason, though, I keep getting the following error:

Fatal error: Call to undefined function: wp_die() in /home/lubbocko/public_html/community/wp-includes/wp-db.php on line 475

I am trying to install WPMU at http://community.lubbockonline.com. Has anyone found a solution to this error?

Please take a few moments and review the readme file as well as the debugging script that it links to. A lot of good information is in there to help you get help here. You do yourself a disservice skipping over that.

A quick look at the 1.3 (I'm assuming that's what you're running, right? The latest version out of trac shows something different for that line.) code shows that you would be reaching that point if you have an issue with the MySQL database. Did you set up a MySQL database for your install? Did you associate the MySQL user with the database? Can you pull up the database on your backend? Are any of the MySQL tables being populated at this point?

Plus anything in the webserver or php error logs? What's your sepcific setup for your server? Have you done any debugging?

Also what specificly is occuring? OK, you're getting an error. What is it occuring? What step are you at? Can you give us specific details?

You just solved it for me. I did not associate the MYSQL user with the database.

WPMU is apparently for ninjas. I don't even have a yellow belt.

Now it's up and running and for the moment I am as happy as a lark.

Thank you.

As a note, I'm pretty sure site5 was one of many hosts where MU (by what is does) is against their TOS, as well as it eating resources.

i'm using it on site5 without any problem (host just few blogs right now)

IIRC, the user that got kicked off (feel free to chime in, I know you're still here...) had a couple hundred, some of which were well trafficked.

When I asked for the Wildcard DNS I specifically noted WPMU as the reason. Also, I've been reading promotional materials about how they support WPMU.

In my case, this is not a public blog hosting service - these are blogs for newspaper staff writers and a select few writers in the community. I'm pretty sure we are within the TOS.

However, I am noticing that WPMU backend operations are no faster here than they are on my Dreamhost account, which has been running blogs.lubbockonline.com at a dismally slow pace.

I may require more power...

Try the object cache:

http://mu.wordpress.org/forums/topic.php?id=5405

Ignore the bit about wp-settings. That got resolved a while back.

WPMU is apparently for ninjas. I don't even have a yellow belt.

Pretty much. Says so in the readme file. :)

If you're just using it for internal company, you should be fine once you get it up and running and can poke around within it.

Not seeing much of a difference in the speed. Might just be a slow connection here, but that's odd, because other sites are a LOT more responsive. Thanks for the help!

I'm still showing your install as not being installed. Take a look at one of mine, open up the page source and look towards the bottom. You'll see a queue count as well as seconds it took to process the page. Please see if you'll see the same on yourse and report back.

example: <!-- 32 queries. 0.108 seconds. -->

Just chiming in here...

"Also, I've been reading promotional materials about how they support WPMU."

As long as it doesn't conflict with their TOS.

"this is not a public blog hosting service - these are blogs for newspaper staff writers and a select few writers in the community. I'm pretty sure we are within the TOS."

Yep, that's why they're letting you stay. As long as you don't start hogging resources & maxing out db connections, you'll be fine.

Andrea - I've been reading over some of the posts here and I understand you were dropped from Site5 on grounds of some TOS violation.

When you were hosting with Site5 did you have access to an admin page indicating your usage stats?

At any time did your usage exceed the limits specified in your contract?

This is important to me, because I'll be using the next 60 days to determine if Site5's Plan To End All Plans will be adequate to host not only our blogs but other properties as well, running additional installations of WPMU and other products on various domains and subdomains.

If it is Site5's practice to merely terminate contracts, rather than automatically bump us up into a higher tier (ie, a more expensive plan) then I will run far and fast from Site5.

Thanks for the input, from all of you, this has been a quite valuable discussion thus far.

"When you were hosting with Site5 did you have access to an admin page indicating your usage stats?"

For things like memory usage and CPU time? No. Not unless they added something ot track that, and frankly I'd be astounded if they did. Their custom backend is built off of cpanel. bandwidth and disk space, yeah I could see that.

They are a shared host, and the bandwidth & hard drive space in inordinately huge amounts are offered because they know you will never ever use them. It is a common practise.

I see they've moved their policy again to here:
http://www.site5.com/support/rup.php

I like this part:
"If, however, you start to affect the overall performance of a server, we do need to have limits and policies in place. Without them it's incredibly hard to explain to the customer, in quantitative terms, exactly how a site is consuming too many system resources."

No, actually, it's not all that hard.

Also note these limitations:
Processes
* Consume more than 16 MB of RAM.
* Utilize in excess of 15 seconds of CPU time.
* Number of open files should not exceed 64.
* Number of simultaneous processes should not exceed 5.
Database Restrictions
* All users are restricted to 15 concurrent MySQL connections.
* Each database is restricted to 2 GB of disk space.
* Database queries should not exceed 3,000 per hour.
* Database changes (insert/update/delete) should not exceed 1,000 queries per hour.

*If* your MU installs stay under, say 100 blogs, and each one is in a seperate account, and you're light on comments & activity, then maybe you'll be fine. I can't recall you saying how big of a site you'd wind up with. The thing to remember with a dynamic application is that every time someone visits, it's making db connections.

I will say we did try to resolve usage issues, but they were not very helpful, mostly saying it was my job to find out what in MU was eating resources. We were being pounded by spam, so DUH. They did not at that time have a policy (that I know of) to bump me to a higher account, nor did they state I had that option. I was on a multi-site plan, having upgraded from a previous plan, and they restructured their packages, so it was considered "legacy". I did not want to be tied in for a year or more. They do state that a Diamond account has 4x the cpu resources and ram than a Silver account, but they don't actually state what that is. They also keep changing their plans around, so it's hard to tell aside from the bandwdith and space. When I was there, they had an unadvertised "bug" in the system leaving some account with unlimited (unmonitored) bandwidth.

Also, the db was so big, I could not back it up in one go, I had to do it in zipped chunks so I'm quite sure it was close to the db limit as well. (I should state that I had planned to move off them sooner, but on top of the house move, I'd been in the hospital twice for surgery, so plans got delayed.)

An MU install with 250 blogs (ballpark, say 20% of them active) will eat up 256 RAM in no time flat. With a serious install of MU, a shared host is just not recommended. At the end of the day, while I was testy in being shut down on the one day where it was most inconvenient to me (I was moving and the moving van had showed up on the same day the site went down and the internet was to be cancelled the next day), I understood their point. I would say the same about *any* shared host.

And if I were doing this for a business? No way I'd put it on shared. Not enough control.

Right now, my install has around 400 blogs, a large percentage of used ones, a over a million hits a month. I'm on a VPS and I had to upgrade my ram from 512 and add 128 to it. I am using less than 15% of the hard drive space I have allocated to me and less than 5% of the bandwidth. About once a month I *still* hit some major CPU usage, but at least I can go in myself and tweak Apache settings. I've also split it off into 16 dbs for better manageablilty. When you start getting up there, you have to be on top of the db pretty much every day, optomizing and backing up.

The other thing I noticed is that when I was there, I could pay 3 months at a time (it was $20-25), now they have it monthly or yearly. Most of the prices have stayed the same, but they're now asking for longer contracts.

So in the end, my opinion is from a professional standpoint, not as a begrudged user. I have sent people to the same company, but they had one single blog, or a handfull of seperate installs, or a message board.

Andrea - thanks so much for your detailed response. I will shortly contact Site5 about my scalability concerns. My department's budget is quite limited, so the pricing / performance of the Site5 Plan To End All Plans is quite palatable.

I can see where staying within the TOS becomes a black art, especially when things like RAM, CPU, DB Connections, etc are considered.

This is not an art I wish to dabble in. Ambiguous contract terms and ever-changing service levels are not acceptable to my organization. If Site5 cannot meet our expanding needs then I will have to find hosting elsewhere.

That said, I've been pleased thus far with the performance of my Site5 account, as opposed to my Dreamhost account. For some reason, WPMU performance on Dreamhost (again, shared) was abysmal.

Thanks again, Andrea, and everyone.

No Problem. I would certainly grill them concerning your needs. :)

There's a few threads on here about dreamhost and issues people had with Mu on their servers as well.

Mrbrian said somewhere here (I think) that he had a VPS for $8/month. No idea how good it is though. I pay around $55/month.