Hi David
I am starting to have some fun with PT, exploring more and more.
After having corrupted the database trying to reduce full text index to below 4 letter queries, my hosting company is learning with me :) We decided to ditch that idea.
The pt_products table is become bigger very fast and its really hard to do any operations with it now.
I would like to start using a second installation for book feeds and possibly other large feeds to avoid further growth of that table.
What are the downsides to using a second or even third installation with one WP front-end? What should I pay attention to? Are there any useful threads that you would recommend reading?
Hi David
So I understand there is no result aggregation in search results. You have to specifically select the books DB.
This would also imply that Books would not be used for related posts.
I am also running a custom auto-complete functionality which would also exclude separate installations I presume.
So separating out lets say Books, Clothing and Electronics, which all have huge feeds, from the rest would decrease cross relations in the front end...
I guess this is the biggest price to pay for better performance and smaller tables...
OK: I ll try it with books and I take from there.
Thank you.
Understanding all correct - there as an alternative top level search option that performs a result count in each category installation and displays the number of results from each with a link to those results e.g.
Home and Garden (16)
Electronics (45)
etc.
Related products will always come from the same database as the product - which should yield the most relevant results in most cases, bearing in mind that the default code uses category as part of the related product selection anyway...
Cheers,
David.
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PriceTapestry.com
David
One basic question which I think is not clarified anywhere as a direct question.
Do I need a Multi Site WP installation to be able to use a 2. PT instance or can it be done with one?
Hi sociallyfamous,
Let me review this first thing tomorrow on my test set-up as what I think you're looking to implement is the option not as yet covered by WordPress MU (Multisite) Support - that is, a single WordPress installation and multiple Price Tapestry installations.
It's no problem at all standalone, and could also be implemented using WordPress by treating each sub-directory installation as a standalone WordPress + PriceTapestry.org but I will asses the options for dynamically selecting the Price Tapestry database to look at from a single WordPress + PriceTapestry.org installation. Please bear with me and I'll give it a go...
Cheers,
David.
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PriceTapestry.com
OK Sounds great. Looking forward to your news. Thank you very much for looking into it.
I just wanted to follow up on that. I decided to go with additional individual WP installations which are a pain to setup because I had to manually rebuild all the navigation menus to resemble the original sites and keeping the installations similar enough is horrible but it works well.
Hi,
Lots of users run multiple installations - particularly for a books installation, as book feeds as I'm sure you're aware can be extremely large - well worth keeping in a separate database.
If you decide to go down this route, it is straight forward to create a "meta" search at the front end - a single search form with a drop-down box from which to select the category (installation) to submit to.
Considering performance, if you haven't already come across check out this thread regarding MySQL configuration for large databases - in particular, a big increase in key_buffer_size and sort_buffer_size from the defaults is certainly worthwhile - I normally allocate around 1/4 of available server memory equally between the two, e.g. with 2GB RAM available
key_buffer_size = 256Msort_buffer_size = 256M
Cheers,
David.
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PriceTapestry.com