With WP 3.0 out of the door soonish, it kinda doesn’t matter anymore as WPMU ceases to exist. Then it’ll just be a matter of turning on the Multisite part of WP.
As for a large WP/BP community, I guess the largest one is this one, so Andy will be the person to talk to.
Travel-Junkie,
I would disagree that WPMU ceases to exist. It’s just been integrated with the WP codebase, but that code still exists just inside of the WP codebase. From the initial look I did, WPMU is basically using the same tables, the same function calls, etc. So, the performance should be about the same whether it’s integrated or not no? WPMU in 3.0 still creates the new tables for each blogs. It still modifies the registration components, etc. So, I think WP 3.0 or WP 3.0 Multisite shouldn’t change the performance between WP and WPMU I would think.
I hope @apeatling will join this thread and share his experience.
I was talking more about if you should use WP or WPMU. Since you won’t be using the user blogs to start with it doesn’t make sense starting with WPMU, cause it won’t exist anymore (or been integrated if you want, doesn’t really matter).
Travel-Junkie,
I could be wrong, but it seems like the choice still matters since the move from WP to WPMU could still require some modifications beyond switching the multisite on. I’ve tested my various plugins so they work on both. So that won’t be an issue. Anything else, or will it just be easy to switch between the 2 as I please?
All you have to do is add this line in wp-config.php:
define(‘WP_ALLOW_MULTISITE’, true);
Then you’ll have access to the network page to set the multisite up.
@techguy There are a couple of considerations.
First, @travel-junkie is right that you don’t have to do too much to switch MS on in WP 3.0. However, once you’ve switched to MS you can’t go back.
Second, WPMU(MS) performance is really just a function of how many blogs you’ve got. If you install MS and still only run a single blog, resource usage will be practically identical to a single-WP setup. As you increase the number of blogs (and, by extension, the number of db read/writes), required resources will increase in a way that is a little bit steeper than linear. In other words, going from one blog to five blogs (each with the same amount of traffic and activity as the one blog) will require just over five times the memory (the “just over” is because of inefficiencies introduced when you start to get a lot of blog tables in the database).
I don’t have a lot of numbers to back me up (i’m a noob), but at least in terms of DB hits and memory usage (typical bottlenecks for a WP installation, I think), adding BP is more resource intensive than adding a couple of extra blogs. Think of all the dynamic stuff that gets loaded with every BP page load. Plus I would wager that introducing BP means many more page loads per visit, given the nature of the content.
I’d love to see someone with some serious sysadmin chops do a real study of BP performance, so that people will have a nice basis for decision making when looking at potential hosts.
@boonebgorges I suspect the same as far as the BP load. It does seem to be doing alot of dynamic things with every page load.
I’d love to see the same analysis of BP performance. A plugin like wp-cache for BP would be great too. It would just have to be a very different approach since the data is so much more dynamic than a rather static blog post.
