Drupal scalability

By vanguyafo on 9 May 2007 at 23:09 UTC

Is Drupal scalable and be as effective as other customized solution for high traffic sites. I've not seen any high volume traffic sites utilizing it. Why is that so. Any insights?

Comments

www.mtv.co.uk www.theonion.co

alpinejag commented 9 May 2007 at 23:38

www.mtv.co.uk
www.theonion.com
www.ubuntu.com
www.drupal.org

Are a few fairly high traffic sites using Drupal. I'm sure their are more and probably better examples, those are just a few off the top of my head.

It's not the CMS

NancyDru

she/her/hers

English

Boston

commented 10 May 2007 at 00:54

All CMS's will have some points that they are less scalable than others, and some where they are better. But it's really not the software that is the problem.

Scalability is much more the result of properly supplying the hardware. Get a faster server, more memory, more disk space if you're having problems. However, one thing that is almost always overlooked is that most servers (especially PC-based) just don't supply enough paths to the disks. This is why mainframes are still around - you won't ever be able to support the level of I/O with a PC that you can with a mainframe, simply because of the architecture that exists today.

I've been looking at the possibility of buying a server lately. Even though I can get 4 CPUs easily, and as much as 16GB of memory, and terabytes of disk space, all four of those CPUs still only have one bus to share, and all those terabytes of disks still have to transfer the data over that one bus. There is your limit to scalability.

Nancy W.
Drupal Cookbook (for New Drupallers)
Adding Hidden Design or How To notes in your database

NancyDru

Bring on the X-AMP Drupal Clusters

jpstrikesback commented 10 May 2007 at 01:44

who wants to make the VM's???

We'll all love you :>

You can't always tell

yelvington commented 10 May 2007 at 01:45

I've not seen any high volume traffic sites utilizing it.

You can't always tell. Musicbox.SonyBMG.com, Broadbandsports.com, Ourmedia.org, YourMTB.com and JumpTV.com. All very different sites, all Drupal-powered.

Generally, you scale Drupal by:

1. Optimizing the server you have (adequate RAM, tuning, caching, etc).
2. Moving the database to separate hardware.
3. Adding multiple webservers, fronted by an allocator or round robin DNS.
4. Upgrading the database to a cluster.

Drupal is designed for all of this, but you should understand that any dynamic page generation system is going to be inherently much more expensive than shooting out flat HTML files.

If you're interested, see the high performance group at groups.drupal.org and/or review the optimization conversations on the developer mailing list.