scalability of drupal
I am sure you've heard this one before ;)
Sorry, I did search - to try and find something similar...
I am about to create a site that, I believe, will have a large amount of traffic very soon.
I guess I am just wondering if drupal is scalable. And what is going to happen if I have millions of hits a day?
From everything I have read (I come from a java, .net background)
the LAMP stack is the way to go - just check out this article...http://www.mysql.com/why-mysql/case-studies/mysql-friendster-casestudy.pdf - perfect example...
Because if the site does grow, basically LAMP is bound by the hardware - so you just "throw money at it" to increase the hardware and it will keep scaling. That is the way I understand it. Please correct me if I am wrong here!
I am considering drupal simply for the speed of getting up and running quickly (relatively speaking) and while something could be written by a team of developers in probably the same amount of time, of course that costs money up front...
So if I have a dedicated server, and enough RAM - will drupal handle all that "out of the box" - with some minor tweaks?
thanks!
throw iron at it
there is a drupal site which runs off a quad xeon db box and 12 (or is it 16?) web frontends. They easily tackle more than 6000 concurrent HTTP requests. And -- that's one Drupal, too.
--
My developer blog. | The news is Now Public | Ask not what Drupal can do for you -- ask what you can do for Drupal.
scales well
Drupal scales well, but it depends a lot on your database and what kind of modules you install. For example, logging statistics to the database can _signficantly_ increase the load. Certain modules, such as the image-module, also require a lot of resources. Especially if you show a random picture on the index-page. But the core of the system is very good, my point was just that by reducing complexity you can often gain more than by throwing more hardware at it.
The caching-functionality works pretty well, you can also benefit from stuff like eAccelerator. If the site really grows you can have multiple Apache-servers (separate machines), in which case you would only be limited by the database, which is sort of unavoidable. I wouldn't worry though.
Thanks guys
thanks for the comments guys. you've set my mind at ease
arkepp, I understand your comment about reducing complexity - but who does that? ;)
That is the way us developers think - not the rest of the world - they just expect the apps to do whatever they want to do, and now! seriously, thanks for the comments - hopefully I can create some cool modules for drupal and give back in my own special way :))
Theonion.com
http://www.theonion.com
is using Drupal, I believe. They are hugely popular (they were the #1 search result in Google for a while when searching for the word "the". :-) )
Cheers,
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Tony Wright
Day2 Technology Ventures - Venture Capital for Technology Startups
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