By Ron Chandy on

I am trying to change my site to a drupal site. But my hosting company says that Drupal sites do not scale well. How true it is and what exactly could the meaning to this be.

Ron

⋅ Categories: Drupal 6.x

Comments

cog.rusty’s picture

cog.rusty commented

Whether Drupal scales well depends on "used how?" and "compared to what?"

Generally "doesn't scale well" may mean that, when the traffic or the amount of content or the number of users increase much, a lot of resources (memory, CPU, man-hours) are consumed and the site becomes very slow or unavailable or unmanageable (different meanings).

This is not particularly true for Drupal. Sure, a Drupal site may need a lot of resources, depending on what functionality it has and what modules are used (the "open buffet syndrome"). However many big and busy sites (including drupal.org) have been running Drupal with some reasonable hardware and optimizations.

I think that if you can achieve the same functionality with either Drupal or with something else, only then a "doesn't scale well" question can be asked in a meaningful way.

Ron Chandy’s picture

Ron Chandy commented

Hello every one

My hosting company explains as under:

It means that when Drupal sites are hit with lots of Traffic they cause server resource overloads due to it's dynamic content creation on the fly. When a HTML only site is hit with lots of traffic it is mostly a bandwidth only issue.

So Drupal sites do not scale well and if a site becomes very popular or gets media attention it can cause Server Overloads that may require upgrading to a Managed Dedicated Server or disabling your site to protect the other sites on the same server.

I am now thinking" Do all hosting companies think this way ". Please guide

Thanks for any help

Ron

cog.rusty’s picture

cog.rusty commented

That is about right, writing html pages is much easier on the server resources.

But as I said they are comparing different things. A car consumes resources (gasoline) while walking does not consume gasoline. Now, whether you ride a car or you walk depends on where and when you want to go. These days no big site would be possible just by writing html pages, without a content management system based on a database.

So, if writing html pages is not sufficient for you, you would need to compare Drupal with other CMSs based on a database, configured to do similar things (if they can).

A cheap shared hosting account should be fine for a Drupal site with a few hundred visitors a day, or maybe a couple thousand (depending on the host). For a high traffic site, they are right, you would need a better hosting plan.

juan_g’s picture

juan_g commented

Like I commented in other place, to be much lighter on the server -therefore very scalable-, and to improve the user experience (speed), you may use Drupal 5.x modules such as Boost (static page caching for anonymous users) and Advanced cache (for logged in users). They seem to work well together (see Advanced cache besides boost?). Like many other modules, these are not yet updated for Drupal 6.x.

We can see some performance graphs comparing common database caching with the much more efficient Boost's static page caching.

See also for example a discussion on this forum (Do I need memcache?) about caching options.

prodosh’s picture

prodosh commented

Yes caching certainly is key to scaling sites. Check out the following high traffic Drupal sites:
- http://teamsugar.com
- http://nowpublic.com
- http://mtv.co.uk
- http://myplay.com
According to Alexa the are all among the top 10,000 web sites in traffic as is http://drupal.org

So the simple answer to the question is: "Yes, Drupal can be scaled".

If your hosting provider is advising you to write static HTML pages, it may be time to look for a different hoster.
_______
Anolim: developing and supporting multimedia, community and collaboration solutions

_______
Safe Swiss Cloud: Enterprise grade cloud infrastructure for Drupal B2B solutions and platforms.

alihammad’s picture

alihammad commented

At times I have seen my server die down just because it is cheap! Drupal will do well when you provide it enough space to breathe, a cheap hosting company and cheap servers will surely never like to handle drupal.

The search module takes quite some power when it comes to processing. Besides, the inbuilt caching mechanism is good as long as you donot have a website which gets kinda updated every minute or several times an hour , since doing so requires drupal to cache the site again every time at an update!

So ur server's strength can play a major role when you are catering for a large client base.

Ali Hammad Raza
WordsValley.org