Note: This article was originally published in 2014. Some steps, commands, or software versions may have changed. Check the current WordPress documentation for the latest information.

Prerequisites

Before you begin, make sure you have:

  • WordPress installation (self-hosted)
  • Administrator access to WordPress dashboard
  • FTP/SFTP or file manager access to server files

How to: Have (http://wordpress.org “WordPress”) communicate with (http://www.mysql.com “MySQL”) via (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_socket “Network socket”)

As I keep looking into how to improve the performance of website one of the recurrent points mentioned is to use Linux sockets where possible. I really don’t have much experience and I can see how avoiding the TCP stack might help but I figured at least it couldn’t hurt. If you are able to establish a socket connection to MySQL you might also be in the camp of those interested in having WordPress connect to MySQL via a Linux socket connection vs using an IP Address. I searched but it seems there are not that many people doing this, so I thought I would share it so you can also give it a try to your site if you want.

The standard way to connect to a host is:

servername:/route/to/mysql.sock

by default this might look like this for many people:

localhost:/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock so your wp-config.php file would look like this:

/** MySQL hostname */ define(‘DB_HOST’, ‘localhost:/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock’);