[wp-hackers] Running several WordPress sites on the same server

[Ryan WP Mailing Lists]

The RAM benefit isn't something I had thought of. My assumption was its
still 100 copies of WP running even it it was just from one source and so
RAM footprint would be the same.

I think some legitimate points were made though about the viability of such
methods. Specifically on that post by otto, that article they talk about
managing all those symlinks. The more I think about it the more I question
if I can really trust that hack to hold up in production. And for what to
save some disc space? We all know that's cheap, Google gives me 10GB of
space for me email for free.

The RAM aspect does raise a potentially good point, I would have to look
into some hard figures of the diffrnece in the two methods and how much the
extra RAM does cost. And while I will agree it is easier to identify hacks
in one set of core files, it does also mean a hack affects all of the site.
Again some simple cron job tuning every night to verify MD5 hashes of every
core file against a known good file. If it doesn't match it could put the
site into maintenance mode like an upgrade, quarantine the file for my
review then replace it with a known good version and remove
the maintenance mode.

On Thu, Aug 23, 2012 at 3:07 AM, Simon Dunton - WP Sites <
simon at wpsites.co.uk> wrote:

> There is a pretty big performance gain to be had from using the PHP APC
> opcode cache in terms of page load speed and requests per second. If you
> run that on a site with 100 separate WordPress installs that's potentially
> going to take up considerable RAM (lets say 30MB per site which could add
> up to around 3GB)
>
> If all 100 sites shared the same core codebase than you might be able
> reduce this to 5MB per site (I'm plucking figures out of the air here, it
> depends on the themes used, plugins etc). This would work for multisite and
> should work for simlinks although I'm not sure if that's the same for both
> hard and soft links.
>
> Then you've got the disk space benefits.
>
> Also it's also much easier to keep track of one WordPress core instead of
> 100. By keep track I mean keep the core files in a local git repo so that
> you can track any changes made by a hack/virus etc.
>
> So, many positives to running multiple sites from the same codebase,
> definitely worth investigating and I do hope you report back with your
> findings.
>
> Simon
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