Expansion of Service
June 15, 2008
We have made a few changes to the service and will directly improve the performance of the service and the space required for the upcoming improvements in our social networking. With the insight from some great people we have now setup our backup service well beyond what we originally planned and improved the hardware to deliver a great service for our friends and family. We are happy to have you all blogging with us and thank you for your patience through our upgrades.
xCache and eAccelerator
May 22, 2008
We are doing some testing of running xCache and eAccelerator on the server to help boost the performance of all php applications on the server. The obvious choice of this optimization is WPMU since that is the only application run on this server 
First, we tested out eAccelerator and it was a good thing to have installed. It helped us with serving up pages faster and helped with our concurrent users. Used in conjunction with object cache and will wp-super-cache the server was immediately running faster. What was disappointing to me is that not only does eAccelerator use loads of disk space, it also was more of a memory pig than I imagined it would be. I jumped to using an additional 100 MB of RAM and after 24 hours did not drop even though it was configured for 32 MB.
Next we ran xCache on the server and it seemed to be as fast as eAccelerator and in the beginning was also using some additional RAM but it must have been for the first caching. It eventually released the memory and had a smaller disk write for caching. With the addition of object cache and wp-super-cache it seems faster using less resources.
That is the one that we are sticking with for now. I am not sure why eAccelerator wouldn’t release the extra memory, but I was testing out 3 common configurations for VPS servers and nothing helped. xCache did drop the memory after the caching and seems a better fit for us right now. More after further testing.
March 2008 Update
March 29, 2008
One of the great things about the hosting solution that Onvertigo Bloggers is running on is the ability to make the changes necessary to keep the server running at its greatest efficiency and upgrade resources as they are needed. Since the launch of the service in January we have a spike in traffic and resources. In the month of March it looks like the server will have managed 350,000 hits from 60,000+ unique visitors without flinching. Part of this is because of the resources at our control and part of it was through some optimization. The interesting thing is that Onvertigo Bloggers is still an invitation only community and will remain that way as we get our growth strategy in place. In fact, we might leave it that way anyways 
The latest change was managing our database solutions and have officially increased the number of databases serving up information from our blogs to 256. While this solution is maybe “over the top” right now, it may become essential down the road and like any project, looking at the end goals is necessary right from the start. Just the move from 1 database to 16 was an interesting move, but from 16 to 256 was even more interesting. If others want to run WPMU and expect growth, my suggestion is do the 256 from the start
There are many discussions out there on whether a VPS (virtual private server) has the resources to keep up with the demands of a blogging service versus a dedicated physical server. It seems to me that the power of the VPS that I am running could handle plenty of growth and while I could eventually move to a dedicated physical server, I am more likely to run a VPS cluster solution. Maybe move the database to one VPS and the file server to another. It is not something that is required now, but something we can look at down the road. Happy blogging!
Trent Adams