In this tutorial we will cover optimal MariaDB 10.1 setup for Ubuntu 14.04 on a VM with 2-4GB of RAM. This is part 2 of the “Make WordPress Fly” tutorial. You can find part 1 here. Part 1 covered the benefits of using HHVM, MariaDB, Nginx and Ubuntu 14.04 to run a WordPress website. In this section we’ll be digging in to MariaDB and the optimal configurations for it. This tutorial assumes you have a VM with at least 512MB of RAM, 1 Xeon Core, 10 GB HDD and Vanilla Ubuntu 14.

HHVM, MariaDB and Nginx Make WordPress fly (seriously). This site is running on what may the fastest possible software stack for WordPress. That stack is HHVM, MariaDB 10.1, Nginx and Ubuntu 14.04. As you are browsing this site you may notice that it is graphically intensive. It also leverages many CPU hungry plugins that would make it take 6-10 seconds to load on even good shared hosting. With this aforementioned software stack pages up to 5MB on this site still load in under a second, end-user pipe permitting.