WordPress MU

I am currently using futurehosting.com's cPanel Gold service(http://www.futurehosting.com/cpanel.htm).

With their special that's going on, it doubled the bandwidth and RAM, so I have 20GB of disk space, 768mb of RAM, and 900 GB of bandwidth.

With that said, all I've done is install the WPMU 2.7 trunk, uploaded two small pictures, and installed a plugin (dynamic content gallery).

As of right now, futurehosting says I've already used 3.1 GB of disk space and 287mb of RAM. How is this possible? I hardly have anything loaded.

Also, with only 20gb of disk space, it seems like I'm pretty limited to the number of bloggers I have if I give 10mb of storage. How much storage do most WPMUers have?

The RAM seems right. Not sure about the space.

As for user storage, most of them won't use what you give them.

For comparison:
Disk Space Used 10.3 GB of 40 MB
Memory Usage Used 261.9 MB of 768 MB

And that's on my own setup, same host.

Got any stray zips kicking around on the server? You know under cpanel you can see which folder have the most megs in them, right? Also, check the size of that plugin folder.

Disk Space Used 10.3 GB of 40 MB

Looks like you're in a lot of trouble there, Andrea. ;)

For the RAM memory, you also have to remember that you;re running the webserver, the database server, cPanel, the underlying software that divides up the box, etc. etc.

If you have root access, do a 'top' from the command line to see all that's running.

As for the storage, there's probably still the install zips there as Andrea points out. May even be the OS zips or *.rpms still there as well.

It's been about 4 years since I ran a cPanel box so I'm probably not the best to answer how to clean it up but I know when I kick out a Direct Admin box, we have to go back through and clean it out.

So as the number of users increase, does the RAM increase quite a bit?

With 768mb of RAM, approximately how many blogs will that support?

Also, do most of you use 10mb for the storage allotted to bloggers? To me that seems like nothing...but with only 20GB of space it will have to do for now :)

So as the number of users increase, does the RAM increase quite a bit?

Yes because more instances of Apache are being activated to serve those visiting and using your install.

Also, do most of you use 10mb for the storage allotted to bloggers? To me that seems like nothing...but with only 20GB of space it will have to do for now

Really depends on what filetypes you allow for uploads. If it's just images, I'd leave it at that or maybe bump it up a bit more. A rule of thumb we use is the average blogger is going to use about 3% of their space available. That allows those who set up blogs and then never use them, those who blog but never use images or use a service like flickr, and those who upload 500 images from their grandkids' birthday and then complain about running out of space. (heh :)

I know some folks were working on using the Amazon service to offload uploads. Not sure if that ever got off the ground.

Sorry, I'll have to butt in on this one.

"So as the number of users increase, does the RAM increase quite a bit?

With 768mb of RAM, approximately how many blogs will that support?"

This is were a lot of confusion happens, and a lot of guesses get returned as an answer.

In all honesty, there is no magic relation between specs and number of blogs.

What it comes down to is the number of requests, and the amount of resources it takes to serve those requests.

You could have 1000 blogs, or 10 blogs. If the number of requests are the same, the resource usage will be quite similar. Even with caching, a request is a request to MU.

That's without getting into how many plugins the blog has turned on, etc., but overall any request goes through index.php (or blogs.php, etc. but I'm keeping it simple). It doesn't matter if they're requesting a permalink from blog 1, or blog 100, it all goes through the same files.

Without getting into the db side of things, again it all comes down to the number of requests, and by that (to clarify) I mean traffic.

Again, 10 high traffic blogs may be similar to 1000 barely active blogs.

You'll have to watch your server load and responsiveness, and when it gets close to struggling, diagnose it. It may be from bad requests, tons of errors, or just plain needs more power.

Even a general guideline, other than MU not being suitable for shared hosting, is tricky. Nobody knows how much traffic you have or will have. Most of the time, when setting up a new site, you won't even know.

A VPS like that is a decent start. Watch your resources, make sure you have some form of caching (xcache and super cache is a good start), then keep an eye on it.

If it starts to become slow, take a look. It may be a plugin, it may need to be scaled up. Only you will be able to know for sure.

"Also, do most of you use 10mb for the storage allotted to bloggers? To me that seems like nothing...but with only 20GB of space it will have to do for now :)"

You'll run out of resources before you hit space concerns more than likely, even giving up 100M or so. YMMV, but that's a good estimate. Traffic depending, file type depending, etc.

Awesome Lunabyte! That was extremely helpful, and it answered one of my other pending questions (whether the super-cache plugin worked with MU).

I'll definitely keep an eye on my resources!

Thanks again!

What lunabyte said, exactly.

Also:
"For the RAM memory, you also have to remember that you're running the webserver, the database server, cPanel, the underlying software that divides up the box, etc. etc."

On FH boxes, bare, RAM use is negligible, so they don't seem to count all that. Slicehost, for examples, does.

Hmmm, that's strange as both of our offsite VPS'es that serve as DNS servers have cPanel on them (We don't use them for any hosting so I never look at them outside of checking the yum update once a week and looking for rootkits) and it;s a good chuck of the memory.

Yeah, I know. :D That;s why I like FH. For reference, I've got about 10 cpanel accounts running on that box, too.
(and spam assassin and 3 MU installs and a half a dozen WP installs and and...)