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What a great idea!
I wondered if you could recommend the best way to set up WordPress on a virtual machine without much memory?
I have a virtual machine with 256Mb RAM for running my website, and after trying Apache (used too much memory), I settled for nginx + fastcgi + php + apc + mysql + wordpress. This runs well, but I don’t have a lot of traffic yet.
Can you recommend any other software to help me cope with a digg or slashdot mention?
Thanks 🙂
You should try tweaking the configuration and modules for the software you use. For example apache has a lot of modules loaded by default. Some of them you might never use but they will occupy memory. The same goes with php.
On some vps platforms you can extend the virtual memory by using a swap partition or file. This will allow you to use more virtual memory so things would not just die when you reach the 256 mb limit but it will be very very slow.
For high traffic, caching the pages is the best way to go. wp-super-cache is a plugin that will save the pages on disk and then they will be served directly from there without going through php code or the database.
Still I’m not convinced a vps with 256 ram is enough to sustain big traffic. You might want to look into amazon ec2 instances. It’s a bit more expensive
then a 256 mb vps but a small instance is way more powerful