By GotMals on

we are going to launch a social networking site where we hope to gain 5 million users.

can drupal handle this quantity of users?
what is the upper limits that drupal has been tested with?
what are the optimizations that must take place for this kind of user base?
anything i should know about the database and this quantity of users?

any help is greatly appreciated.

⋅ Categories: Drupal 6.x

Comments

vm’s picture

vm commented

http://groups.drupal.org/high-performance

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ei=R7RBSrn2EY6xtwezp5GmCQ&sa=X&oi=spe...

GotMals’s picture

GotMals commented

can anyone give me ideas of how many users you currently support on your drupal site?

vm’s picture

vm commented

drupal.org has approx 550,000 user accounts

GotMals’s picture

GotMals commented

i guess i should have been more specific. im looking for the max number of concurrent users sites built with drupal have been able to support?

vm’s picture

vm commented

In the time you've waited for this question to be answered, you could have benchmarked drupal on your own hardware to see what your environment can take. Which I think is far better then a flat number that may get thrown out there that wouldn't mean much in comparison to your own environment.

so many variables

logged in users, anon users
what those logged in users are doing
amount of RAM, caching mechanisms in place, so on so forth.

WorldFallz’s picture

WorldFallz commented

Yeah really -- i have to agree with VM. You're not likely to get a meaningful answer to this question. The important point is drupal can scale-- or companies like sony wouldn't be using it for their artists sites and the like (ie mtv.co.uk). For some great info on scaling drupal see 2bits.com.

geerlingguy’s picture

geerlingguy commented

Just wanted to add here that I run a couple sites in the hundred-thousand-plus range. Drupal handles hundreds of thousands, and likely millions, of users extremely well. I think by the time you have that many users, many of your own embellishments on top of Drupal's core stack will be the things you'll need to worry about. Drupal's {users} table, core data handling, etc. all scale very well.

And once you hit a few hundred thousand users, you'll quickly need to think about multi-server caching and front/back-end separation. That's the same as if you use most any other CMF/CMS, or if you build a service yourself (or on top of something like Symfony or Ruby).

But, in short, yes: Drupal can scale.

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socceronly’s picture

socceronly commented

Can someone share a list of really really big massive Drupal sites?

Is d.org the biggest forum?

I know this doesn't answer the op's question... but I really am curious what kind of monster Drupal sites are out there.

:)

vm’s picture

vm commented

Define: "really really big massive"

amount of content in total? amount of content submitted on average? total comments? total comments per day? amount of users? amount of visitors? per hour? per day? per month? per year?

whitehouse.gov
sony artist sites

many lists which can be found with google on of which are on the dries' site.