WordPress MU

First off, im new here and i love the support that you guys provide.

I have a website running Wordpress Mu with currently around 400 successful blogs. All the blogs combined get around 73,000 unique visitors a day with around 230,199 page views per visitor. I have a powerful server with 6GB Ram on a 100Mb connection. During heavy traffic periods i get the ocassional wordpress error establishing connection. Ive tried tweaking the mysql settings, but it always seems to make the problem worse. so currently i have max_connections set at 150.

does anyone have any advice or help to fix this problem?

thanks in advance

I'd take it a lot higher.

There is a script (tuning-primer.sh) which actually gives some pretty good advice about tuning mysql. But be warned, it might tell you a lot of things you didn't want to know!

There are a lot of things you can do.

The biggest is install WP SuperCache. This will save your server some work. Instead of hitting your database for each visitor, it'll serve a cache file (which is refreshed at a set time of your choosing).

Next, look into PHP opcode caching. Try XCache or eAccelerator.

The next thing would be to tweak Apache (or whatever Web server you are running). If you are running Apache, you could try the mpm-worker module instead of mpm-prefork. It'll help distribute the work Apache is doing.

And, of course, optimize MySQL. Here's an email from Matt (WordPress Founder) on his recommendations: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/files/matt-mullenweg-wordpress-mysql-recommendations.txt