Luther Monson, Staff Software Engineer at SUSE

Luther Monson

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What Does One More WordPress Site Cost?

I measured what each extra WordPress tenant on one ePHPm instance costs in RAM, file descriptors, CPU and disk. The sweep ran from 10 to 1000 sites.

9-Minute Read

Line chart of ePHPm steady RSS against tenant site count: linear at about 2.2 MB per site with every site open, flat past the default LRU cap of 256

ePHPm v0.7.0 shipped per-site multi-tenancy. Point [server] sites_dir at a directory and every Host maps to its own docroot and its own Turso database file. One process serves all of them. The first question anybody asks about that is “how many sites fit on a box?” The honest way to answer it is to turn the question around. What does one more site cost? If you know the marginal RAM, file descriptors, CPU and disk for a tenant, the box size falls out of arithmetic.

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Luther is a 20+ year software veteran specializing in backend APIs and architecting products. Employed at SUSE as the Team Lead for the Containers on Windows Team working on Rancher + Kubernetes