Is drupal good for high traffic sites ...
nahids29 - December 25, 2008 - 08:08
Is drupal good for high traffic sites like facebook? can facebook be built on drupal? I am going through lynda.com's drupal essential training (video tutorials), and there i learned that drupal is not good for high traffic sites!!! is it so? It says that drupal is not good for million page views! is that true?
If yes then whats the best cms for a high traffic sites.. And all you geeks out there can you tell me what kinda cms does facebook / orkut uses? how are those sites built?
Wow, nice site. 19k Alexa
Wow, nice site... 19k Alexa rank.
That yours or you just work there?
what rank are you talking about?
what rank are you talking about? im not talking about any alexa.com .. well u dint get my question right
There are PLENTY of high
There are PLENTY of high traffic sites buillt on Drupal.
Drupal.org itself is built on drupal.
You need appropriate server, which can be a shared, VPS or Ded according to your needs of 'high' traffic - the server needs to have features necessary for drupal, and,
on your side you can use certain 'cache' modules.
You might like to see this article http://2bits.com/articles/php-op-code-caches-accelerators-a-must-for-a-l...
How your site does also depends on the number of modules and blocks you use.
Facebook like site, or even better than that, can be built - you need APK and OG modules apart from buddylist, PM, acidfree/newer album modules and some more for that.
If your server is already optimized and you are fairly conversant, facebook like site can be built in less than few hours once you have chosen the theme and the modules you need.
Some more links that may help you
http://groups.drupal.org/social-networking-sites
http://shellmultimedia.com/articles/site-recipe-building-community-portal
http://couleeregiononline.com/
http://groups.drupal.org/node/1834
are u building your
are u building your facebook?
u mean u have the budget as facebook has?
for very high traffic site, of course Drupal is NOT your choice.
if drupal is not the choice
if drupal is not the choice then whats the right choice for high traffic sites..? and about budget!! i dont know whats the budget required for creating facebook! you tell me about it
"if drupal is not the choice
"if drupal is not the choice then whats the right choice for high traffic sites..?"
i dont know the answer of this question.
But I do know, Drupal is php based, for very high traffic, sorry ..NO php !
..that's enough to support my answer.
As an aside, Facebook is
As an aside, Facebook is actually based on php! However I believe that a lot of development has gone into it, so it may not be exactly the same as what we know as php.
Magnity
http://webdesign.magnity.co.uk
Drupal 5 themes | Drupal 6 themes
> i dont know whats the
> i dont know whats the budget required for creating facebook! you tell me about it
Put it this way, it was originally funded as a closed project amongst the 'Ivy League' universities, to provide a profiling service to students. After a year they decided to release to US high schools, and its investors paid $200,000 *just* for the .com domain, which indicates how much finance and resources they could to plough into it.
First of all, you have no chance of convincing investors to put *any* money into a clone of an already existing, popular service. Secondly, the three founding members of 'ConnectU' have accused Mr Zuckerberg of stealing the code; the case wasn't resolved due to a 'technicality' (which probably means, you can't sue someone with rich, powerful, Ivy League connections). The point being, these things are usually created by TEAMS of people with specialised skills, not by lone noobs tapping away in their bedrooms on a CMS they've just downloaded.
Can you make a website with drupal which mimics facebook, and have a few hundred daily users without making any major monetary investment? Yes.
Being a complete noob, can you do the above within a few months? Probably, if you have several hours a day to spend on it and learnt fast. For instance, it's taken me 400 hours to complete my first website with drupal; it's a complex school website, and I used it to learn about Drupal as I went which is why it took so long. But I think a noob doing a facebook clone would require more time than that, if it was their first site.
Can you create a website that has ten thousand daily users, by yourself, with no investment, turning over a million dollars within two or three years? No. Absolutely not. If you want to do that, join a team with a conceptually new, winning idea, and the skills and financial backing to implement it. You'll find that they'll probably write the code from scratch, so if you can't do that, you'd need to find some other worth of you being on the team, like graphics, flash, animation, accounting, business strategy, media promotion, fund-raising, advertising, consumer testing, etc.
well well well
Sitting in your bedroom and typing all of this, you could have given me the wiki link of facebook right away. lols... poor guy. Well anyways now i know that the fake strategy of facebook has bonged your head the way it was planned. Take care!
Listen, you sounded clueless
Listen, you sounded clueless and in need of a reality check, and that's what I gave you.
If you want better answers, write better questions!
For instance:
> can you tell me what kinda cms does facebook / orkut uses? how are those sites built?
> i dont know whats the budget required for creating facebook! you tell me about it
What part of those questions didn't I answer exactly? If the information I gave was somehow beneath you, why ask such stupid questions then?
Realise that every month there are several 'how do I build [insert multimillion dollar website here]' questions, usually by people completely ignorant of what it takes to develop a web-service that can produce a good income for the creator. They don't know that you have to treat it like a business, just like any other service or product. Your post fits that profile perfectly, so you can perhaps understand why you got these answers.
I was simply trying to save you from wasting hundreds of hours, building a site on false expectations. But since you're so sarcastic and full of yourself, I think building a failed website might be the best way for you to wake up to the realities, and learn that there is a difference between rising to an achievable challenge, and attempting the near impossible simply out of ignorance. BTW, if you were implementing your million-dollar idea 'the right way' (as you claim below), then you wouldn't be on here asking these types of questions!
rite
i asked what kinda cms does facebook use as i had learned in a tutorial that drupal doesn't support high traffic... thats y i asked.. as fb is built on php.... god dayummm... let that be there... I am a newbie, every legend was a newbie... SO WHAT? i have questions i will clear them out... ill get a new way for business with my idea stuck on my mind... Wasting 400 hrs? rite!! Even if i had realized that i wasted 1000hrs behind a bullshit thing, I would yet be happy of learning how not to make it next time...i wouldn't consider myself wasting any time as it is all a part of my experience... let it be where it has to be... you told me earlier if i had an idea of budget for fb... thats y i asked you how much..!!! it all started with silly lines of codes, errors etc.. but now.! it is a topic discussed everywhere... Thats how i will bring out my idea for a new type of business ova web... i have it all documented and ready...!
And yo! I dint ask how do i build [mm d web]!! y would I?! no one is gonna reply to a stupid question like that.. i asked about cms! anyways... chuk it out!
> it all started with silly
> it all started with silly lines of codes, errors etc.. but now.! it is a topic discussed everywhere... Thats how i will bring out my idea for a new type of business ova web... i have it all documented and ready...!
The whole point of my post was that 99.5% of these famous websites DO NOT start as 'silly lines of code'. There is a highly skilled team and a lot of financial backing. They are a business in the very traditional sense. If you want to ignore that and learn the hard way, then be my guest. I'm certainly not going to waste any more time on you, except one more piece of advice - when you approach investors don't use the phrase 'business ova da web'. lol.
mm167 I don't agree with you
Read the following :
Is Drupal the right tool for the job?
Why should I use Drupal, and not any other CMS? How does Drupal compare to Joomla
Drupal FAQ
List of Drupal Sites
Add references to your posts.
Ghana Real Estate | Griffonia Seeds | Shea Butter
drupal is like a mechanic
drupal is like a mechanic saying heres the framework body of the car. go build yourself a car LOL
drupal needs to bring some of the modules into the core....D6 has been out 2 years and still modules are slowly coming out.
you cant drive a car, with just the framework ;)
still drupal has some nice designs, but it looks like a proof of concept than a polished product
I Agree
That's right expatme, I totally agree with you. :)
www.oozman.com
I'm always amused when I see
I'm always amused when I see newbies proselytizing about what's best for drupal, lol. You might want to at least get your fact straight-- Drupal 6 was released 2/13/08. A simple look at the releases page would have revealed that fact.
===
"Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime." - Lao Tzu
"God helps those who help themselves." - Ben Franklin
"Search is your best friend." - Worldfallz
I am amused
by people who use the word "newbies" as if programming and developing is the rocket science of the century...
anyway, good point though. Drupal 6 was released on 02/13/08.
Is Drupal scalable?
Hey, nahids -- I'm the creator of the Lynda.com videos. You raise a good question, and it hurts me to see people giving you a hard time about it. You don't deserve it.
In brief: Drupal is just fine for just about any site you want to build. When I said that it's not for "very high-traffic sites", I meant the top 1,000 sites in the world -- and even there, I'm not so sure any more.
I posted about this subject before, at http://www.topnotchthemes.com/blog/080923/review-lynda-com-s-drupal-esse... -- see the first comment after the review. I'll probably post something in my own blog (at http://www.tomgeller.com/blog) about this soon, because I'd like to open it up to wider discussion.
But in short, you can feel safe in the knowledge that it's very highly unlikely that your site will outgrow Drupal. :) All the best,
---
Tom Geller * San Francisco
Author/Presenter, "Drupal Essential Training" video series at Lynda.com
TomGeller.com * GellerGuides.com * SaveMyHomeBook.com
rightly said.
Well i dont mind people giving me a hard time.. All i take it as a challenge... if i asked about facebook these noobs thought that i want to create a clone of facebook!! lols y would i do it? I have an idea and i am implementing it in the right way, I would not want to change the cms for my site laters. Thats the reason i asked the questions but none of them got it right. People went on writing about it they would have posted the wikipedia link of facebook, which i had read like years back. I know how facebook got its right domain from aboutface and i know how Divya Narendra and team of ConnectU hired Mark (Ceo of facebook) to test their code. Facebook is a clone of ConnectU. Well the disclosure of the fake budget of facebook domain is to tell you noobs that you cant afford to build a facebook... lols .. anyways.. Tom tell me y cant drupal handle traffic? It all depends on servers right?
Please read above
How ?
http://drupal.org/node/351049#comment-1170150
Did you read the above ?
Have you planned the modules you need, gone through the cache issues and talked with webhosts?
Best wishes for your site.
Bottlenecks in Drupal
nahids29 writes:
Tom tell me y cant drupal handle traffic? It all depends on servers right?
Only partly. The three biggest potential bottlenecks are:
1) Scalability problems (i.e., not just the number of servers, but how the load is distributed among them).
2) PHP, which was originally designed as a lightweight scripting language, with little attention given to efficiency. However, that's changed over the years, so beliefs that it's too lightweight for heavy jobs might be obsolete.
3) The back-end database. Drupal 7 will introduce a database layer that (they tell me) will allow Drupal to use DBs other than MySQL and PostgreSQL, which some believe are less able to handle high loads than Oracle.
I'm not knowledgeable enough to say whether these judgements of PHP, DBs, Drupal internals, etc. are valid. But I'd heard them raised enough to pass on the warning.
Cheers,
---
Tom Geller * San Francisco
Author/Presenter, "Drupal Essential Training" video series at Lynda.com
TomGeller.com * GellerGuides.com * SaveMyHomeBook.com
With all due respect Tom, it
With all due respect Tom, it was not the question that caused the hard time.
===
"Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime." - Lao Tzu
"God helps those who help themselves." - Ben Franklin
"Search is your best friend." - Worldfallz
NO, questioning the fanboys
NO, questioning the fanboys against their object of affection is always bound to cause headaches and hard time ;)
Of course it was !!! come on, drupal cant handle high traffic?? mon dieu, blasphemy :D
BTW, facebook sucks, i dont understand the fascination......i have seen invision forums with better content management and user management.
yes Facebook is using a lot of web2 technology and it runs much better than the iframe monstrosity that is myspace but some of their features are stupid....
i would use forum package like phpbb or SMF forums for a social site really......drupal right now is all bones and no meat....sorry ;)
(i mention the opensource forums coz its better for us to have them developed further, same way that people should set up their own networking site to counterbalance Facebook and myspace)
The act of questioning is
The act of questioning is also not the cause-- you can question whatever you like. And should. But if you do it with a flippant 'of course i know know better than you' attitude tinged with condescension, don't be surprised when it's not received very well and responded to in kind.
Don't be sorry-- use whatever you like on your projects for any reason you like. But spreading fud will garner a response-- particularly when doing so with all of 8 weeks experience with which to make such judgments.
Drupal is anything but all bones and no meat-- if anything it's the opposite. It's just that you need to be more of a mechanic to be able make full use of it. If you simply want to install something, check a few boxes, and end up with a fully functional web app to your exact specifications you're definitely using the wrong product.
At least we do agree about facebook-- i don't get it either. ;-)
===
"Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime." - Lao Tzu
"God helps those who help themselves." - Ben Franklin
"Search is your best friend." - Worldfallz
you been spying on me ??
you been spying on me ?? :D
I must be using 100 modules to get the functionality i need from drupal ;)
bit of patchwork i must say LOL, and one of my site is broken from one of the module updates and i dont even know how to get back to my modules page
EDIT: and i must admit that most of the other opensource CMS'es are barebones anyways, funny but i find the forums better CMS' if you can theme them right
.......
I really don't get this - drupal.org, particularly this forum has the highest traffic amongst all cms and forum scripts, and it runs on drupal.
So far as constructing a social web ( like orkut, facebook ) there is no other free,opensource script as easy as drupal - even paid scripts fall inferior in many ways. Site like shellmedia has even ready made downloads, packaging all necessary modules, that can let you start your social web in less than a hour.
The number of modules is not the issue, if its one module and a big ugly resource consuming script and then there is some 50 modules, but lightweight and fast the second option works for me. And any social network script available in the market like phpfox, socialengine, dzoic does need plenty of modules with huge number of files.
How successfully a 'large' crowd is handled depends on the server, its softwares, configuartions and how you have used the cache and similar drupal modules.
Hey Tom!
You mentioned in your video that facebook is a cms that we cannot use! Y is that....? Have they built their own cms? How do u know that its cms.. Give me some information about it please......provide me links to read more about it
You can use it... with them hosting
Hey, nahids29. What I said is that you can't download the software that runs Facebook.
You can use it as a CMS of sorts... by getting an account on their servers, at facebook.com. :)
---
Tom Geller * San Francisco
Author/Presenter, "Drupal Essential Training" video series at Lynda.com
TomGeller.com * GellerGuides.com * SaveMyHomeBook.com
Short answer is: NO!
Short answer is: NO!
Longer answer is, the problem with Drupal is it was designed as a framework to do (or support doing) too many things, ending up not being great for any of them. You might find 80% of what you need available, but it is the remaining 20% that may kill you. Drupal's biggest strength and weakness is open source development model, driven by volunteers. There are a lot of gems here and there, but it is not very often that someone has the motivation and time to achieve industrial-grade quality and in reasonable time. Many decisions, like not providing upgrade paths between module versions, removing features, etc. are outright criminal. Another pet peeve is very little thought given to end-user experience/usability (with its own scalability implications). There you are entirely on your own.
Yet longer answer is that you can greatly increase scalability if you are willing to roll up your sleeves and hack Drupal core, looking at it simply as just another template PHP app. One scalability showstopper for example is lack of native support for database replication and CDNs - without which there can be no real scalability. With a few patches, however you could add this support, but then you will have to really dive into the code, understand what you are changing and test, test, test. Even then, you cannot just get rid of Drupal's overhead of loading all PHP code (needed or not) all at once and increasing DB load. But you can definitely improve a lot.
At some point though you have to ask a question if this hacking is worth it or it is better to build a custom PHP app from scratch. In my view it is feasible to use Drupal in a very limited role (minimum modules), relying on your custom code for heavy lifting. Just do not assume that Drupal core or contrib module developers thought about scalability at all. Try to keep the number of contrib modules you use to bare minimum or prepare to spend a lot of time hunting for bottlenecks, perhaps AFTER your site goes live and disappoints users.
I have used Drupal for 3 years, sometimes it really helps and sometimes it makes me want to shoot someone.
Is drupal good for high traffic sites?
Yes, with the appropriate optimization, and cache modules such as Boost (static file cache), Memcache (RAM memory cache), Cache Router, etc., which go beyond the standard database cache available in Drupal core.
For detailed information, see the Drupal scalability resources listed on the handbook page Drupal caching, speed and performance. In its Case studies section there is info on high traffic Drupal sites using Boost, Memcache, etc.
Yes
Drupal can be used for high traffic sites. I usually tend to customize a bit of the core and strip it down. Its not rocket science and anyone with basic PHP skills can do it. Ofcourse you need to do a lot of caching with cache modules, and get it right, use a front end PHP accelerator, and then watch it grow. If you think about it, if your site needs grow, and you have a lot of traffic coming in, then you start considering scaling the DB and Round Robin DNS Heads (as we call them). Increased traffic also means you are making a bit of money so I'm sure you can afford to go up.
The reason I have noticed as to why drupal is slow, is that its a seriously heavy duty CMS. First and foremost, Drupal is a Content Management System. And a lot of people in my office don't believe that its the Number 1 Opensource PHP CMS in the world. It has too many features pre built, and some modules are not industrial strength based, but like I said, its not rocket science. Pull out your Netbeans, Kdevelop or whatever IDE you use and sort out what you need. Too easy to just drop a plugin and it works. You need to do a bit of work. Qualms I have with Drupal though is the DB. Yes, I wish we could go beyond MySQL and PostgreSQL, but even worse is that Drupal has way too many tables. Elgg has 20 something odd tables and to build a semi basic social network with Drupal, you end up with 100+ tables and 200 is a realistic number. Something needs to be done there.
Don't forget to improve on MySQL caching (I learned the hard way). And don't install 300 modules on one install. The DB will become too big. If you can, have a dedicated machine for the DB on its own. Giga International are affordable and no I'm not advertising for them. If you are going mission critical, then you may consider using a CDN. Facebook and everyone else does this. If facebook relied on themselves, you would see the difference. Remove whatever you don't need. Themes, theme engines, modules, libraries, strip it down.
All in all, yes its possible. And its much more easier than you think.
Good luck.
Kahenya
Kahenya.com
VIRN
Further discussion on this topic
There are some interesting comments in response to my recent blog post, "Can Drupal handle high-traffic sites?", which also links back here.
Those interested in the subject should check it out. Cheers,
---
Tom Geller * San Francisco
Author/Presenter, "Drupal Essential Training" video series at Lynda.com
TomGeller.com * GellerGuides.com * SaveMyHomeBook.com
Tom!
Tom,
Finally... facebook has coded his own cms.... well anyways i have heard people say that drupal cant handle 200 authenticated users at one time... well i dont understand y is that! well for that i will actually concentrate more on caching and Mysql... Well u know even facebook use to be slow! but later its fast now as it has more than 10000 servers... So it all depends on optimization of modules and ajax etc... rite?
At my company we build a
At my company we build a multidomain (more than 300) website on just one drupal installation with more than 5000 users.. Works like a charm.
Oh Thats great!
nice.... well thanks for ur concern... !!!!
WordPress is too simple and
WordPress is too simple and Drupal is too complexed, what the web needs is a middle class CMS.