By cinquetooty on

A big project is potentially heading my way. I've burned myself trying to set up several sites with Drupal and wondered what more seasoned users would say about applying Drupal to this project.

I'd need to created a turnkey system for driving websites - largely pre-configured, with just a theme change and a logo upload. The customer's software package uploads daily a text file and photos of properties - each node is a house or flat to let - so I'd need to parse the info.

How many domains could Drupal reasonably be expected to run on a dedicated server? I've not tried a single install - multisite installation yet - but I've seen mention of severe problems with high server load which wouldn't go down too well with clients - so could I expect Drupal to cope with running 50 - 100 - 200 sites on a single installation on a single server?

I'm more than capable of writing a mean and lean CMS to do this project and will probably go that way - but despite my ongoing problems tryng to bend Drupal to my will (I suspect my life would be easier if it were the other way round) I do find it a worthwhile package to work with so will consider it and would really value some input from you guys and gals.

Thanks

ian

⋅ Categories: Drupal 5.x

Comments

yelvington’s picture

yelvington commented

The number of domains is not a problem. You need to worry about whether you have adequate CPU to handle the volume of traffic, adequate RAM to support in-memory caching and PHP acceleration, and a well-tuned database server.

cinquetooty’s picture

cinquetooty commented

Thanks,

but how do I quantify that without doing the project first?

I don't know if it's an issue, but I've seen mention of up to 100 sql queries being required to dish out a single drupal page. If I coded my own system that would be in the region of four or five queries to a site running from only five or six tables. That's a vast difference for a site that has fairly modest requirements. Run 50 sites on the same installation and I can see problems on the way.

Often I wait for twenty seconds + for a page to be served on the drupal.org site and I'd hope that that's running on the best spec servers. I know there's a lot of data to sift, but it's not terribly impressive.

Ian