By the1brit on
There is an interesting discussion of Drupal's social networking scalability capabilities going on over on sitepoint right now. I wonder if any of the people on here have checked it out, or have some input:
http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/showthread.php?826510-Drupal-or-Custom-C...
Comments
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"between 200,000 and 1,000,000 logged in users a month"? Er... yeah... I love Drupal but I wouldn't consider it for that project. That's an insane amount of authenticated users.
Michelle
I ready through the
I ready through the posts.
Not sure I grasp why they are suggesting Drupal or MySQL/PHP can't handle hundreds of users online at once.
One of my vBulletin site has had over 500 people logged in at once, posting with no problems at all. It's running on a crappy old server.
Of course it depends on what those people are doing. But the way people are talking in that thread that 1000-2000 people logged in is really high.
I see vBulletin sites with 10 000 people logged in.
What am I missing here?
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I don't know about php/mysql in general, but Drupal does far better with anonymous users than authenticated. With anonymous, you can cache it like crazy to handle the load. With authenticated, different users see different things and it's much harder to cache. That said, people who really know what they are doing with performance can work wonders so it may not be impossible... Just not a task I would want to take on. LOL! Plus, Drupal's social modules are still kinda weak... So that's another hurdle aside from performance for building a huge social site.
Michelle
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I know this is vague, but would appreciate some gut instinct by people.
I am really disturbed by the fact that people are saying 1400 users using a Drupal site at once is a problem, authenticated.
Using the forum, as that is what I am converting from vBulletin to Drupal, is 1000 concurrent users a serious problem? On a quality single server (again I know this is vague)
We don't have a million users, but we do have high peak time when there is a game about four times a year.
Hmmm
JM
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It really depends on your hardware, how much you optimize, caching... drupal.org is handling quite a few logged in users (I don't have stats but I wouldn't be surprised if it was that high or even higher) but they also have people who really know what they are doing to handle the load. So, yes, Drupal is capable of handling it but not right "out of the box". It takes work to tune it and decent hardware (ie: don't try it on shared hosting).
Michelle
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I asked on IRC and killes ran a query that showed there were 8K authenticated users in the last 24 hours. I don't know how many were on at the same time, but that's quite a few and the site responds just fine. Again, though, we have smart folks that know how to get out every bit of performance running things behind the scenes.
Michelle