Server-setup for multisite with 100,000 blogs?

Get a dedicated server with dual Xeon E5s, a pair of enterprise HDDs and a pair of enterprise SSDs.

Configure RAID1 for both pairs of disks and use a hardware RAID controller with a BBU (Battery Backup Unit) cache. Install the OS/applications on the HDD and place the databases on the SSD pair.

If you wish to host the database separately the connection between the DB server and the web server should be using something like fiberchannel to keep latencies to the minimum.

Thanks for the answer.

I’m on Linode, with E5’s + SSD’s so hardware-wise I should be covered. I was just wondering if it’s better to split the DB + content files on 2 servers instead.

If everything can run hassle-free on one server, then i’ll keep doing that, but if there is a serious increase in performance/speed by doing something else, ill gladly explore that?

You’re welcome!

What is the size of your Linode?

When I said dedicated server I meant a server with resources fully dedicated to you, Linode is a VPS with shared resources so you will be needing a very large plan to accommodate all those sites.

At the moment if you don’t have so many sites stick with the current Linode and upgrade as you grow.

I was just wondering if it’s better to split the DB + content files on 2 servers instead.

For now keep it on the same VM, use Linode’s longview to monitor each process and move the DB if mysql is using too many resources.

Installing Memcached will reduce the MySQL load.

You may eventually need to split the DBs, but that depends on how big these 100,000 sites end up being.

Also? Ow. Ow. Ow.

This is gonna be a headache for you.

Yes, absolutely move MySQL to another server. Remember, with Multisite, you’ll have a minimum of 9 tables per site, so almost a million tables just for the sites, not counting the size of the data in the tables.

We have about half of that, and run Apache on VMs with 6GB RAM and 4 CPUs (don’t know exact specs), but moving MySQL off the Apache boxes helped immeasurably.