After rebuilding this blog following a small disaster I allowed to happen a number of lessons about MP-WP have been collected:
The Quality of MP-WP Documentation Has Improved Through Addition
There are now several guides to setting up MP-WP. The most recent addition by billymg offers the clearest instructions for getting MP-WP running on a Rockchip and alleviating certain persistent pains. The esthlos guide remains solid in the general case. Lobbes covers yet more interesting issues to consider.
One Simple MySQL Configuration Tweak Saves Lots Of RAM
By the default configuration MySQL will default to using the InnoDB engine to store everything. This come with substantial RAM usage spent on ACID compliance and caching. In the read often write infrequently environment of blog substrate InnoDB is overkill and on a machine with a hard RAM budget like the RockChip, MyISAM appears to be a safer choice. RAM allocated to MySQL has dropped from 1.3 GB in my last stack to ~100 MB in the present stack.
In my.conf simply add
default-storage-engine = MyISAM
In the
[mysqld]
section of my.conf wherever it happens to live on your system. Probably /etc/mysql though there may be others possibilities.
Substantial MP-WP Funnctionality Needs Apache2
In my last stack I used lighttpd. Pingbacks never got sent. In this stack built on apache2 pingbacks are being sent. Substantial reading would likely be necessary to unveil what other MP-WP functions are dysfunctional on alternate httpd software.
One still further bonus is that Apache2 with mod_php is sitting in less RAM than lighttpd and it's php-fpm instances.
Edit This One File To Get A Civilized Archive Page
To get an archives page that looks like this you can use this line in your archives.php file in the default theme:
<?php wp_get_archives( array( 'type' => 'postbypost' ) ); ?>
Conclusions
The rebuilding sucks and is a reminder that discounting the need for frequent backups doesn't kill the need. On the plus side, after this rebuild there is a whole lot more breathing room on the RockChip.