What about memory usage with MySql? I've found that to be a significant bottlene...

dugmartin · on March 30, 2012

Varnish takes the load off by caching the results from Wordpress. The Total Cache plugin handles purging cache entries when you update posts/pages.

If you want to see how many queries Wordpress runs even for a simple post install this plugin I wrote at my last job. It shows a log of queries in the page footer if you are logged in as admin.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wpdb-profiling/

EwanToo · on March 30, 2012

I didn't play around with MySQL in those settings at all, mostly because the last thing you actually want is a query hitting the database.

You're right though, if you start adding a few less well coded plugins, then you can start hitting the database a lot, for no really good reason.

jamesgeck0 · on March 30, 2012

The caching software and http accelerator probably mitigate the need to hit the database at all.