I too am currently evaluating BuddyPress, for use in a University (so in 5 years we’ll be looking @ roughly 30.000 blogs). My experience so far is that BP needs a lot of queries to load the page.
Has anyone got any experience on finetuning linux, apache php and mysql for a site like this (memory, caching, network etc)? Needless to say i’ll be running a dedicated machine for this site (and got root access).
I’d love some configuration recommendations, specifically on proxy/caching strategies, backup and clustering.
Howdy, the boys and girls over at http://wpmued.org and their fearless leader http://wpmued.org/members/admin/ aka the Reverend, aka Jim Groom seem to be on the bleeding edge of this activity in education. Prowl around over there and ask Jim. He’s not afraid to tell you what his opinion is at all.
Trent, aka trentadams, a moderator here, has experience in larger mu installs and bp configs.
server configuration is not difficult, difficult is managing databases,
Ask and i’ll help you 
(me as trent and burt)
I would recommend using wp-super-cache.
Thanks a lot guys! I already found Jim (where would the world be without Google these days 
) and he seems to be a great resource indeed. I also read about supercache and i will absolutely give it a go.
I originally posted after getting a ridiculous server lag (118 queries in 38 secs or slower) but it turned out to be a very badly configured hyperactive firewall and now i’m getting the same queries in about a second, which is ok for now.
Anyway, thanks for the directions, i’ll be sharing some of my results soon i hope.
Keep up the good work!
Beyonddesign: To answer your first post, it depends on the traffic you’ll be generating, meaning how often will your members visit?
I’m getting very nice results with Ubuntu 8.04.1 lts, latest stable packages of apache2/php5/mysql5, configured with only 1cpu and 1gig of ram, running on a vmware esx3 host (note: hosting only 80 very active blogs)
I’ve been looking at this recently too
I read somewhere the demo BP version on this site is on a basic VPS and it has about 3k members. Basic VPS’ tend to be about 384MB ram and dual or quad core processors. The timer in the html comment in the footer says it loads most pages in 1 to 1.5seconds.
Anyway, whilst researching this people recommended
– WP Super cache
– PHP cache : APC or eAccelerator
Then
– PHP Speedy may also be an option
– Nginx is a lightweight web server which may help
And if you have something like 10k+ users you would probably be better off installing the multi-db plugin. Hyper DB is the free one i think.
And if you have silly amounts of users
– Multi-db across a few dedicated servers and
– Perbal: think thats a front end proxy that forwards on requests to various web servers.
Best way to operate a high traffic wpmu for buddypress by having two servers to run separate for mysql and wpmu/buddypress. I learned that Multi-DB 2.7 beta came out but only for WPMU 2.7 without Buddypress. It had some problem with Buddypress so they need to start from scratch for Buddypress. I wanted to know about HyperDB’s compatible using WPMU/Buddypress.
Will it be enough for a dedicated server of 2GB RAM with 2x Processors for MYSQL only and 4x Processors with 8GB or 16GB RAM for WPMU/Buddypress?
It would be nice for Andy or a guru here to give us an advice to have a start up for two servers or more to expand as much it grows later on. Thanks! Looking forward to the final release on Feb 12th.
Thanks for the comments guys….I just wanted to know if I was going to have any problems as the network grew. I am currently on a VPS with I think 1280 MB RAM. My install of buddypress never takes more than a half a second to run the queries so it sounds like I’m getting good times…though I just have a handful of beta testers right now.
I may try the multi-db plugin, but it seems that the problems that I’ve been having over the last couple of days are due to my host and not my buddypress install…my sites have all been down for the last 4 hours.
One last question for jedbarish or anyone else who wants to contribute…can you explain why it is best to run MySQL from a different server than the WPMU install?
I can’t say I’m much of a server guru, but what I have found I’ve documented here:
Improving Performance
I’d appreciate it if you’d add anything you find to that page for others to benefit from.
It did not say anything about using HyperDB from WP. Do you have any experience that BP will be working nicely with HyperDB? BP is due for the final release by tomorrow so I need to know if anyone tried HyperDB without a problem. I am planning to start fresh with BP and WPMU which it will be easier to deal with HyperDB or Multi-DB.
Is there anybody share their experience with HyperDB for WPMU with Buddypress so far?
