Showcase: The Light's Right
I have run a digital photography site for several years. Two urls pointed to the same site.
I wanted to make the site into a digital photography community site with features like blogs, comments, tagging, etc.
So I broke up the URLs. The old site used HTML, a little Javascript, and Dreamweaver.
http://www.thelightsrightstudio.com
That site is still around. I am migrating all of the free tools, tutorials, etc. The site will remain as my personal gallery.
The new site is written in Drupal 5. I purchased a template from Drupal Shark and modified it.
My concern was site performance. I serve video. Long videos upwards of 45 minute to an hour in some cases. 800 x 600 with CD quality audio. I had heard (and saw stress tests) that indicated Drupal bogs down after 40 or 50 simultaneous users. I heard PHP was slow on IIS. I heard there was no mod-rewrite for CleanURLs.
First decision. Dedicated server. Colocated. The site is using a quad core server, 2.5 GHz, 6GB of RAM. 1.2 TB of disk space. Mirrored. Single dedicated 100 mbps connection currently. Four more connections available. There is also a socket to add a second quad core processor.
Second decision. Microsoft Server 2008 Web Edition. IIS 7.0, added FastCGI and Zend to improve PHP performance, enabled server caching, added new module from Microsoft for URL rewriting.
The Drupal site uses lots of modules. CleanURL, DiggThis, Five Star, Frequently Asked Questions, ImageCache, SMF Forum, Tagadelic, SMTP Support, Thickbox, Tiny MCE, Technorati, UberCart, XML Sitemap, etc. it is no exaggeration to say that the home page requires several dozen MySQL queries.
I have been very pleased with both the reliability and the performance of the new site. It has been online four weeks exactly today. It crashed once, and that was my fault. I made a mistake when I copied the transation logs for MySQL from the development machine to the production server. This morning, there were 488 simultaneous users briefly. I was adding content at the time and noticed no performance issues even under that load.
Caching is turned on in Drupal. I do not use aggressive caching. I have too many modules that would have issues with aggressive caching. IIS 7.0 is currently using page caching and kernal caching. I am very happy with the performance right now. Dries would know better than me if aggressive caching or a PHP cache would give much of a performance boost. I would worry about the tradeoff in reliability. If performance is excellent and aggressive caching or a PHP can lead to system hangs and crashes, why run the risk?
I think the site does demonstrate that Drupal sites, running from just a single server, can dish up dynamic pages with lots of content and handle hundreds of users. It should also demonstrate that Microsoft Server 2008 and IIS 7.0 can give excellent performance. I went that route for two reasons (1) more experience with Windows than Linux and (2) lower costs of ownership (Microsoft Server 2008 Web Edition was less expensive than Red Hat Linux).
Comments will be welcome.
Cheers,
Mitch
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It's a nice looking site. I'm a hobby photographer so am interested in the site itself, a rarity on this forum. :) Just curious, why did you go with SMF?
Michelle
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See my Drupal articles and tutorials or come check out life in the Coulee Region.
I was not happy with the
I was not happy with the forums capability in Drupal 5. I decided to add a third-party forum. I saw Drupal Shark was using SMF. That told me it could be integrated with Drupal.
Mitch
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If you have time, could you be more specific? We've come a long way addressing most of the problems with Drupal's forums so I'm always interested in what issues people are having that drives them away. Usually it's people with huge existing forums that don't want to switch but your forum looks new so there isn't that reason.
I'm headed out of town until Sunday so I don't know when I'll be able to look at this thread again. If you answer and I don't respond, that's why. Unless you do it real quick before I leave. :)
Michelle
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See my Drupal articles and tutorials or come check out life in the Coulee Region.
I'm using Drupal 5. I was
I'm using Drupal 5. I was not enthusiastic about the appearance of the Forums module, especially how threads displayed.
There was also the feature set of forum software like SMF. Most photoography sites I'm familiar with use vBulletin or SMF. SMF gives me IP logging, digesting, etc.
Cheers,
Mitch
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Well, the appearance is just a matter of theming. This looks pretty similar to yours. It's actual feature differences that I'm interested in. What does the IP logging do? Is that different than what you get with statistics? What do you mean by "digesting"?
Thanks,
Michelle
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See my Drupal articles and tutorials or come check out life in the Coulee Region.
That's a very nice example.
That's a very nice example. Had I seen an example like that, I might have made a different choice. ;)
You should be able to link to messages. Here's one from tonight: http://www.thelightsright.com/smf/index.php?topic=71.0
The link does not appear up on the URL at the top of the browser. But if you hover over a message subject, you can copy the short-cut.
IP logging lets me see the IP address for every message that's posted. It lets me know if someone is playing games by using multiple logins to do something like flaming or trolling.
Digesting is the ability to take the messages and replies and send them to someone who subscribes daily, weekly, whatever.
Thanks for the spamming advice, too. Requiring e-mail verification helps a lot, I believe. Plus the ability to limit the input for comments also helps. Their attacks seem to focus on leaving a comment with an XML sitemap or some other pasted HTML block that is easily filtered by limiting the input format to Filtered HTML.
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I think a lot of people don't realize Drupal's forums can easily be made to look like what people normally think of for forums. It's a shame because you can really do a lot with Drupal's forums and having the content be integrated into the rest of your site is quite nice.
We've got the IP addresses covered with the user stats module. Digesting I'm not sure... Possibly the subscriptions / notifications modules.
Thanks for the answer. It's always helpful to know why someone chooses to bridge rather than going native.
Michelle
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See my Drupal articles and tutorials or come check out life in the Coulee Region.
It owes as much to ignorance
It owes as much to ignorance as anything. This was my first Drupal site. ;)
I had not done any theming when I made the decision about forums. I was looking for a forum solution that I could drop in place, modify through configuration settings, and get a familiar look-and-feel for digital photographers who use sites like DPReview.com, RetouchPro.com, etc.
I built this who site without writing any PHP code. Not even for theming, since I bought the template from Drupal Shark. I used modules from Drupal.org site, installed them, and configured them.
Mitch
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Ah, well, building a forum in Drupal is a bit more involved than turn it on and go. You need to gather together several contrib modules. It doesn't take coding, though. That site I linked you to has no custom coding and uses an off the shelf theme with just a few very minor CSS tweaks.
At some point I plan on writing a tutorial for building a forum. It's not hard to do but can be a bit intimidating if you are new to Drupal. Thanks for the discussion. It helps to see the situation from another person's perspective and see what still needs to be done to make Drupal forums the "obvious" choice. :)
Michelle
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See my Drupal articles and tutorials or come check out life in the Coulee Region.
beautiful!
i didnt understand much of the developer's talk you mentioned. Are you like, managing your own server at a long distance host, or you are doing all that locally thru a home line? Also, did you consider image/media hosting with a bucket service like Amazon web services?
I'm pleased you like the
I'm pleased you like the site.
I colocated the server with a local ISP. Network Tallahassee. I have an electronic keyfob that gives me access to the server 24x7.
I am in Tampa almost every week. I still need to buy an HP Lights Out card, so I could manage the server securely remotely. Right now, I drive across town.
The server is firewalled behind its own router. MySQL is using a local named pipe. I did that to make sure it was offering no services a hacker could grab. The only services that the server allows is HTTP and FTP. FTP is secured. No anonymous FTP. That means, without something like HP Lights Out, I have to sit down at the keyboard to manage the server.
I pay for SMTP and POP to handle e-mail. I did not want to run my own SMTP server. Too many spammers and hackers trying to bang at them.
I considered hosted server, dedicated server, and colocation. I bought my own server. Those specs I listed cost me around $1600. I pay $125 per month for server colocation. That is a fraction of what a dedicated server would cost, and the specs for a dedicated server would be much more limited. I figure in just 3 months, the server has paid for itself. After that, I am at least $500 per month ahead.
I considered Amazon S3. There were too many limits for it to be practical. Plus, they were having performance issues when I was considering it for delivery of video content.
Cheers,
Mitch
Spammers
While I was poking around your forum, I noticed the spammers thread. (Can't link to it... For some reason the URL of your site doesn't change when in forum posts). I highly reccomend using Mollom. It's done a wonderful job of protecting my sites and it's free for sites that don't have a large amount of legitimate posts.
Michelle
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See my Drupal articles and tutorials or come check out life in the Coulee Region.