I disagree that high-performance blogs are a solved problem in distros - depends on who's linking to you.
Wordpress on Apache melts on a small VPS under a few hundred hits per second, using gobs of memory for each call. So you turn on supercache etc. and it gets a little better, for a lot of application complexity.
Now put varnish in front, override some of the cache-ability headers from your application, and my experience is that when e.g. Stephen Fry's twitter links to the site, your site becomes CPU or network-bound instead.
From memory, from maintaining a friend's site, the number of simultaneous connections to melt down the server (using siege, on a 4GB system) were something like 300 connections without any optimisation, double that if Wordpress had spat out .html files and Apache was serving, but with Varnish in front, it started to slow down at around 2000 connections.
There's a reason you want to serve your application from a database - it's nice and easy to change your pages on the fly, but serving static files through Apache is hardly the best you can do for optimisation.
Wordpress on Apache melts on a small VPS under a few hundred hits per second, using gobs of memory for each call. So you turn on supercache etc. and it gets a little better, for a lot of application complexity.
Now put varnish in front, override some of the cache-ability headers from your application, and my experience is that when e.g. Stephen Fry's twitter links to the site, your site becomes CPU or network-bound instead.
From memory, from maintaining a friend's site, the number of simultaneous connections to melt down the server (using siege, on a 4GB system) were something like 300 connections without any optimisation, double that if Wordpress had spat out .html files and Apache was serving, but with Varnish in front, it started to slow down at around 2000 connections.
There's a reason you want to serve your application from a database - it's nice and easy to change your pages on the fly, but serving static files through Apache is hardly the best you can do for optimisation.