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Kind of a late reply here, sorry.

There doesn’t seem to be a great built-in solution — because there doesn’t seem to be much demand.

Of the choices you suggested, NFS is the best option. I would start there. Personally, I like to package things as RPM’s – but this would not work with user-uploaded content at all.

One more thing to consider here: I am trying out some more exotic configurations. I want a way to have all of the content in one source instead of being in two places (database and file system). There is a Linux FUSE project called “mysqlfs” that lets you mount a filesystem as a MySQL schema which I have been using for awhile on a test system. I just mount the DocumentRoot (/var/www/html in this case) as a mysqlfs filesystem and then run Apache normally. For backups, I just have a slave DB and I can easily get all of my content in one mysqldump-generated SQL file.

This approach would not work for someone who is trying to tune the system for every ounce of speed – mysqlfs is not speedy at all. However, it makes backups and load balancing much much easier. It wouldn’t work too well with large uploads either (DDOS potential) so you’d have to make sure to limit the upload size. WordPress doesn’t do much other than complete file reads & writes, so I wouldn’t expect the lack of any sort of locking to be a big limitation – please let me know if I’m wrong.

If anyone is interested in discussing this approach, please let me know. I’m going to try load balancing my site with a larger number of WordPress servers to see what happens.