WordPress MU

Hi folks,

I have been lucky enough to convince my company to allow a server to be re-purposed in order for me to build WP and WPMU based sites.

I have the full support of our network engineer, as he is the one who will be building and maintaining it, but I need to provide him with some information on the ideal setup for this machine (as it relates to WP and WPMU specifically).

I wonder if I can get the opinions of the group here as to what the ideal setup would be for the hardware that we have available? I'm not a server guy, so I'm not sure of everything that needs to be considered.

The hardware includes:

700mhz processor
1BG of RAM

Thanks for any advice you can provide:)

Double the processor, preferably dual processor (multiple cores is a plus as well) and quadruple the RAM.

Linux (choose your flavor), latest PHP 5.2.x and MySQL 5.0.x, latest xCache 1.2.x, and Apache 2.2.x (or LiteSpeed, or another alternative).

Should be a good start, especially for multiple sites, etc.

For a handful of users, and a little bit of traffic you could get by with just doubling the RAM, but MU will eat all it can get its hands on.

And don't forget a backup option.

Pretty much. Also depends on how much traffic you expect as well as how many people you expect to have sign up. Last time we heard, wp.com was on 198 servers over 3 (or 5 depending on who was stating the information) datacenters.

Processor is the weakest point of the setup. That's where you're going to run into trouble.

Great, thanks you two, I will pass on this info!

@lunabyte that setup sure looks familiar!

Trent

correction...

I was told that 700mhz was in fact a dual processor. Is that enough?

It might be OK to start, but everything comes down to traffic, number of blogs, number of other sites, etc.

To me, 700Mhz is too slow. It also signals "old" hardware, which could potentially be in a range for expected failure/degradation. Not to mention motherboard, etc.

You'll also want fast drives as well. Typically that is one bottleneck on a machine serving such content.

@trent... I dunno why. ;)

Gotcha, thanks!