WordPress MU

Dear friends,

I'm strongly interersted in Wordpress MU product.

While I surfing on some forums I met some negative judgments about WP. For example, some people says that "a busy WP site can readly overhelm it's database".

Could you give any explenation for this matter?

I'd like to get acquainted with huge blog portals with large databases that use your product. Please, give me some urls.

Thanks in advance,
Oxatan

Not sure what exactly you expect to hear from us...

"a busy WP site can readly overhelm it's database"

I would say that a busy EVERYTHING can overwhelm the DB if we talk about MySQL :)

If you were more specific about what are you looking for - you'd receive more specific answers :)

And what kind of database do you suggest to use?

You can only use MySQL with WPMU. If you plan to have really many blogs I suggest that you look at this: http://premium.wpmudev.org/project/multi-db

If talking out of WPMU scope - I suggest using PostgreSQL as free DB and Oracle if you have enough money for it :)

I think what Oxatan is referring to is the negative press some troublemakers were making a while ago, with wordpress isntallations that could nto withstand a digg effect....
I don't remember specifics, just that it was pretty much hyped up...

Thank you for comments ;)

I would review caching options. Do a search of the forums as they've been discussed at some length and what you choose depends on what your physical server setup is. (ie Shared, VPS, dedicated? What OS? etc.)

It's dedicated,(quite powerful CPU) installed OS is Free BSD

I posted this somewhere already... We have got a quad-core, 4Gb RAM, 2x500Gb SATA HDDs server with ~7000 blogs there running just well.
And it's just WPMU, without multi-db plugin, without PHP accellerators, without caching... And PHP runs in CGI mode.

I plan to have two MU blogs, one with 100 blogs, the other with 200 blogs. I am moving from a shared to a dedicated server ( still very surprised to have a shared system with two MU's and one test MU, don't think this will last long ).

What are the steps would I need to take for MU once they reach this amount of blogs? They will also probably have at least 100 users per each blog.

I have read that a good dedicated server will hold this much activity, but I also heard that there should be a utilization of plugins such as Multi-DB.

My question is:

1) When should I move to a dedicated server? After adding 100 blogs? 200? Should I move before I even start adding blogs ( I currently have about 50 running on both ).

2) My end goal for the next two months is to prepare for at least 80,000 users and 200 blogs. What are your recommendations for the dedicated server type?

3) What would be the problems with scalability at that level? Would my site get slower? I am talking more about things that I can't necessarily control ( database table ) than things I can ( splogs, spam, useless data ).

I have seen bits and pieces of this type of information but I am still unsure of a good plan to go about it. I am just afraid I won't carefully construct the site and will have too many problems down the road.

80,000 users and 200 blogs.

The above number may never be reached, but I wanted to be safe than sorry.

I've seen a site with less than 20 blogs that needed dedicated.

Why? The sheer volume of traffic. So this is why I say "it depends".

My own site has ... oh I dunno 5? 6? hundred blogs & users? At any rate, it generates 100+ posts a day, fair amount of visitors and it's still on a VPS.