By lenkkivihko on

I am having a promizing social networking site running. Currently we are at +300 members and +4000 posts in 6 months.

I am wondering what kind of difficulties should I expect facing as the community is expanded? How well does Drupal scale up? Any experiences of managing fast growing web site and coping with the growth?

Thanks for your experiences in advance?

Comments

bpocanada’s picture

bpocanada commented

Drupal is scalable. It all depends on what is your System Architecture and what modules have you used and how you have configured the site.

Nowadays its always cheaper to throw a piece of additional hardware to get gains. But in many cases you have to look at other options of optimizing and tuning your site.

Its always good to plan this in advance. Downtime or poor response times can make you lose lot of your visitors and credibility too.

Happy New year and congrats for having this one take off.

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Roshan Shah
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lenkkivihko’s picture

lenkkivihko commented

Any warning signs of nonscalable modules? What are the bad design choises you have faced?

I have a running / sports site running with plenty of modules. custom profiles, organic groups, tracks, pathauto, guestbooks, contemplate, CCK, views... (www.lenkkivihko.fi)

Which of the modules should I be conserned over?

pearcec’s picture

pearcec commented

Does anyone have a credible horizontally scaled architecture for Drupal? Notable how the sessions are managed and the database is scaled.

BioALIEN’s picture

BioALIEN commented

It makes sense to deploy a few dedicated servers e.g. database server, file server, main server. That way the load is spread and less chance of bottlenecks.

From my experience, the main problem to fear is concurrent users. If you're site is not optimised properly, it will grind to a halt.

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BioALIEN
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halfelven’s picture

halfelven commented

I tried to reply to BioAlien's post but everytime I clicked anywhere on the screen after opening the reply window, it took me to his website. That's some optimisation!

But I have 3000 members and 3000 posts, some of them as large as novels and optimising the website is vitally important. I'm in the process of upgrading to 5.0 and some features are not yet available as modules so I've got some leeway in design. Right now, 5.0 takes about 2 seconds to load most pages but I'm wondering how it will do when I go live and have up to 150 people using the website at once.

The caching is much improved in 5.0, BTW, reloads are practically instantaneous. :)

- Erin