WordPress MU

I have searched for and read all of the threads regarding multiple server WPMU installations, but they don't help that much. Most of the people don't follow up with their posts. Could anyone tell me if they have successfully run wpmu on multiple servers? If you have, could you give me an outline of your setup?

Yes => wordpress.com

They haven't been giving away too many secrets.

Are you stuck at a certain point? Gotta admit that server admin falls outside of these forums. Easiest thing to do would be to put the MySQL server on a second box and pint the config file to it.

Excuse me for not knowing this, but what advantages would putting the mysql on a second box?

I run a 70000 blogs install off 3 servers. My setup is described here already: http://mu.wordpress.org/forums/topic.php?id=2163&replies=17
(philosophy = divide and conquer)

Pretty much. Spreads out the load. Won't run out of space for your users.

edit: Ego trip too. :)

I really liked this solution: http://mu.wordpress.org/forums/topic.php?id=1343&replies=22#post-16368 Does anyone know if PerS ever went through with it?

Best bet would be to try and contact him or her. They do link to one of their sites. (I can't load it from here as *.no's are firewalled)

I tried to contact them, but I never got a reply.

Does anyone think/know if it is possible? Quenting, what do you think?

well i have almost the same setup, except i use apache as the reverse proxy, "your db config" is my db config, i don't need another file structure because once you split up your install you never risk hitting the 32000 blogs ever again, and i don't use zend, not sure why i should. So it's certainly possible yes.

quenting, do your users have the ability to upload? If so how much space?

errr yeah of course. What's a blog without upload ? They get 50 megs with the free setup and 500 with the premium.

*chuckle* Wimp. My users get 51 megs. :)

Quenting and/or drmike,
How are you handling the sync between servers of uploads?

I have 2 frontend webservers outside the firewall and the database inside. It all works great, but sometimes a poster gets a 'file not found' on a fresh upload. I put in a cron rsync, but they are complaining about the 1 hour wait... big babies.

I guess I'm just looking for better/different ideas on how to handle uploads.

I'm the wrong person for this.

For me, everything is (or was) on one server. I have clients who run WPMU installs but only one is approaching the need to expand to their own server. We're probably just going to move the db's to the second box if that additional space is needed.

If it was me, I wouldn't sync between servers. I'd spread the load. There's a fix here for MD5'ing the blogs.dir subdirectory into additional subdirectories. I'd spread the top level out between servers.

wp.com does sync'ing between the datacenters. They have missing file issues as well. :)

Sorry couldn't help more.

edit: See? :)

I don't sync, I spread the load. The problem with that is that you can't clusterize your web servers. I plan to solve this by using a very big filer (shared external disk) to store the blogs.dir folders. Another good option would be to handle uploads on a separate server, and serve images with this server. This would mean some changes in the upload script, and a specific subdomain for files pointing to the file server (to be changed throughout the code).

That makes sense, really, Q.

Static files from sans or whatever, separated into the norm 16/256/4096 directories.

Something like files.domain.tld/a5/blog_id/files....

Only limitation to it would be storage space capabilities.

Then again, the file links would have to be altered, but that's probably the least complicated part of it all.

Yeah I've been thinking a separate upload files server on a subdomain is the way to go.

For all the .js .css and image files in the /wp-admin/ and the /wp-includes/js/ folder I've placed them on s3 and created a cname on a subdomain eg assets.domain.com.

All of these static files in the admin panel add up and s3 is almost like a server with unlimited scalability.

It would be cool if you could create some kind of upload system that uploads to s3.

> Then again, the file links would have to be altered, but that's probably the least complicated part of it all.

Depending how you do it, it could just be a matter of linking blogs.dir with the appropriate folder in linux.
Right now I serve the MU static files from a front server acting as a reverse proxy myself. Only the user uploaded files and dynamic requests are served from backend servers, and then again, the user uploaded files are cached on the front server with mod_cache. It's still not good enough to clusterize though.

I'm sitting here looking at the upload_path and fileupload_url settings within the options table and wondering if we could change that like we did with the domain mapping solution we have here.

Things that make you go hmmmm....

Granted though that it appears wpmu ignores what's in there. I mean we don't change those settings when we do the md5 fix for the blogs.dir directory. At least I've never changed them.

True. I haven't changed it, and md5'd my dir's.

But, could it be done?

Without digging into the code at the moment, all files and such run through a php file in wp-content.

It wouldn't be out of the question to alter that file to return a file from an alternate location. Although uploading would probably be the bigger issue of the two.

Why not just do a file redirect on the blogs.dir directory to another server (or the file subdomain mentioned up above) and the md5'ing under that?

edit: It would screw up the google sitemaps though if you did a subdomain like wp.com does. maybe just the forwarding would be best.