This morning I upgraded from 2.6.5 to 2.8.2 and today the server has been down for roughly 75% of the time.
The problem is that 2.8.2 seems to use a lot more resources to work than 2.6.5. I really thought that 2.8.2 would be less resource intensive than previous WPMU versions.
It took several hours to upgrade 400 blogs and I have about 29,000 blogs to upgrade, which I don't think is a very high number of blogs. I'm sure there are people out there that has a lot more blogs on their WPMU installations. It would take me half a month to upgrade all blogs and that's not reasonable.
I can lower the server load by using the .htaccess file to redirect all visitors to a html file that tells them to get back after the upgrade, but I don't want to keep it that way for half a month. That would kill my business.
Is there anyone out there that has any suggestion on how to handle my situation? How do WordPress.com with millions of blogs handle the upgrade procedure?
One other thing:
Before upgrading I backed up all files and the MySQL database by taring the public_html and mysql directories. Taring all files under the public_html directory took about 1.5 hours and taring the mysql database files took about 4 hours. That resulted in about 66 + 12 = 78 Gigabytes of tar files. How do you manage your backups when you have a lot more blogs than I have?
Now I think I've hit the practical maximum of blogs that can be handled on a WPMU installation. Maybe it's time to disable creation of new blogs?
Please send me your thoughts on the problems I'm experiencing!