[wp-hackers] Multiple Sites - One Session

[Jeremy Clarke]

On Thu, Jun 9, 2011 at 3:40 PM, Baki Goxhaj <banago at gmail.com> wrote:

> Well, different databases basically.
>
>
In my experience it's not worth having multiple installs just to keep the
databases seperate. From a performance perspective all my bottlenecks have
been in the posts and taxonomy tables, and those are not shared within a
multisite install. MySQL chokes badly if you give any one *table* too much
traffic, but as far as I can tell it doesn't matter if two tables are in the
same 'database' or just on the same database server, they will have the same
amount of autonomy and will fail the same way when one of those sites
develops a large set of posts and runs complex queries on them.

If everything else about your site plan makes sense with Multisite (i.e. if
the plugins and themes can be shared by all sites in the network, if the
sites are all related enough in terms of their owners/operators that it
makes sense for them to live in the same spot) then you should try
implementing it that way, you lose a lot of benefits when you have multiple
sites instead of multisite, and merging sites together can be a daunting
task if you already have a lot of content and users in the split-up sites.

If you end up needing to optimize the database setup there are any number of
ways you can go about it, but if you want single-sign-on across sites then
your solution will have to involve all these sites living on the same MySQL
install, so the difference in optimization simplicity is pretty small
between Multisite and multiple installs.

Jeremy Clarke • jeremyclarke.org
Code & Design • globalvoicesonline.org