[HyperDB] Partitioning wpmu data

[Felix Gushansky]

Hello, folks. We have just inherited the site that uses wordpress MU (ver
2.5.1) with MySQL 5 on the back. Soon we have learned that the blog db is
huge. Not size wise necessarily (it is slightly over a gig), but table wise.
That db contains over 11,000 tables with the total of over 40,000 files in
the same directory. That hugely affects performance AND maintenance ­ to the
point in fact that we can not backup the db using mysqldump. We had to write
a script dumping a table at a time.

So, we need to scale somehow. That¹s why he have looked at HyperDB, which
seems to have been built just for that. However, the problem we are seeing
is that in our case the tables in the blog db are created and named
dynamically. For each new user wpmu creates multiple tables (8?) in the
database and names them like wp_<nnnn>_comments, wp_<nnnn>_links,
wp_<nnnn>_options, wp_<nnnn>_postmeta, wp_<nnnn>_posts, etc, where <nnnn> is
a four digit integer. Can we take advantage of HyperDB in this case? And if
not what are our options?

Thanks very much folks. Your help is very much appreciated.

-- Felix