WordPress MU

Hi! I have looked through a lot of the topics dealing with servers, databases, apache/litespeed configurations etc., and I am wondering if there are solution companies that are around that can help me set up a server system.

I currently have a dedicated server running 4GB ram with a 2ghz dual core, but this would be our group's best case/worse case scenario:

2,500 blogs
3,000,000 users
100-3000 page views per blog per day
600,000 page views per day ( 100+ page views per second )
6000 posts added everyday

I don't think we will reach even half this point. But I posted this up as a goal. I want to know what are your opinions on:

1. What server architecture would be best for this scenario?
2. What structure should I start with that would be best for scaling with Wordpress MU?
3. Are there companies/people that can configure and scale our site for us?

We looked through the information and seen a good consensus on using clusters of 1-3 servers for files and the other 1-3 for databases (including a load balancing server). I am very new to db/server structure, so any guidance on your view of how I should start would be great! Thanks!

Hey Selec, just wondering if yo have found anything out yet?

We're in the process of trying to scale up a bit too and we're struggling to figure it all out and where to go.

Let me know,
tom

Here's what we've done....

- 2 db servers, using Hyper DB
- 5 web servers running apache.
- wp-content folder is NFS mounted on a single server and shared between the 5 (though the WP folks will tell you not to do it this way, we've had zero problems with it).

- Running batcache (memcached) for page/db caching.
- db is configured with query caching.

With this setup, we've been able to run successfully at over 900k pageviews per day without maxing out. Once we've hit the 900k threshold though, we've hit a wall. Wordpress is making db calls which take several seconds to complete. That combined with a few other factors causes our apache sessions to stay open too long, and not service connections fast enough. Because of this, we've maxed out at about 900k pageviews per day, with about 3000 concurrent users.

We're looking at implementing Varnish now, which in testing has shown will take us well beyond the 900k threshold. We are trying to proof our sites to handle 2million pageviews per day. Hopefully Varnish gets us there. We'll report back if anyone is interested in our varnish results.