I’m currently running wordpress simply to create/manage an XML feed of data using the RSS functionality (slightly modified XML).
I’m running WP Super Cache in order to keep the server load down (I’m getting upwards of 25,000 requests per day for the feed). This works well, but I’m outgrowing the server from pure http requests on the CPU.
I now need to consider scaling. Rather than going the scaled memcached route, would it be possible to instead actually create a new static RSS feed when each new Post in wordpress is created, rather than use a cached version? I’m not entirely sure where the RSS feed is cached with WP Super Cache as there is no physical file copy of it in wp-content where other cached files are, which makes me wonder how “cached” it really is.
My thinking is having a load balancer pointing to two+ servers simply serving this one static XML/RSS file… is that too simplistic?
FYI I am running a mediatemple (dv) server which is Intel(R) Xeon(R)CPU L5520 @ 2.27GHz, 1GB RAM. It’s my CPU that is growing out of control, RAM is absolutely fine. I guess I could potentially look at a dedicated server with better CPU as an alternative.
It’s not cached on the file-system, and it’s not cached in the database. At least, I can’t seem to find it, which makes it unlikely that the feeds are actually cached. It seems that this plugin does exactly what you want though. I’ve just tested the plugin in my WordPress (version 3.0.4), and it works like a charm. Good luck!