WordPress requires MySQL. There was a PostgreSQL fork a while back that died off pretty quickly. We have a well appointed database server that shares duties with many other sites and applications – the database server is not a virtual machine and has directly attached storage to maximize IO (all the normal stuff you’d do to create a high performance database server).

Our WordPress application server is a xen VM with 3 gig of ram and 4 cores. We run nginx as a caching front-end proxy to our apache backend. This nginx config has been packaged as a plugin, along with sample configurations. Former Berkman developer Daniel Collis-Puro’s talk about high-performance WordPress (along with an overview of Berkman’s nginx deployment) at Wordcamp Boston 2010 is available on wordpress.tv.

Posted in: Blog Admin FAQs