By kleung11 on

Our association has over 220 members with their own websites. We have a custom proprietary CMS which is getting difficult to stay current. While investigating open-source packages, I came across Drupal. I am very new to Drupal but have gone through various docs to see that it supports multi-site, for example but have the following questions

The current setup
We have 2 app servers running Java (dual xeons, 3 Gig RAM) and 2 db servers currently running oracle (dual opterons, 12 Gig RAM).
During the holiday period last year, we had just under 23,100,000 hits to all our websites combined and we expect this number to be higher but not significantly more.

The setup that we have is an e-commerce website with custom search and the ability for each of our member websites. Some sites get significantly more traffic than others. If we decide to go with Drupal, we expect there will be some custom modules and rewriting of certain features.

Questions
1. Does anyone have any similar setup?
2. We can buy a few more servers (may be 1-2) or add memory, but would that be too much for Drupal to handle? I would assume putting over 200 websites on a single Drupal install will be too much. We can split our members into different servers with different Drupal installs, but would that work?
3. How much memory does Drupal take for a similar website with that kind of traffic?

Any help/advise/directions are greatly appreciated.

Thanks!
Ricky

Comments

robertdouglass’s picture

robertdouglass commented

I think (among others) one of the reasons you didn't get answers is because there aren't any. Not without trying some things out, seeing what you need, making some feature specifications. Your servers are pretty beefy. With proper caching (memcache) you might be able to serve 23M. The 23M hits is a bigger factor than 200 websites.

- Robert Douglass

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my Drupal book

kleung11’s picture

kleung11 commented

Thanks for the reply. Yeah, I realized it when no one replied but decided to go ahead with it. We are currently pretty close to finalizing this and the memory usage is about 25M or so. With APC enabled, the memory usage goes down drastically to way under 10M. It's also great that memory prices are so much cheaper now too. I also think 6.x would help though we are sticking with 5.x now because of the number of modules. We also bought an additional server for the migration and also to do load testing on it to get a better idea. So far, with the help of the apachesolr module and some custom modules, things are not too bad at all. The one thing with apachesolr is that the indexing takes way too long so we might have to adjust the timeout to none and submit all at once. solr supposedly can index several millions in less than 2 hours time.