So far my site seems to run ok - I've got 15K users, 5K nodes, 5K comments and make extensive use of views, cck, feeds, taxonomy and voting. I'm not sure what my growth path is regarding infrastructure / caching though. Right now I have the site running on a single VPS powerful enough to serve it.
When (in # of users/nodes/comments) would you guess I'll run into performance issues?
What is a sensible upgrade path for a site size like mine? I know there are all kinds of complicated things that could be done with the server, or servers to split the traffic via something like squid or even drupal disk caching modules like boost. What I'm really looking for is a "best practices" type of guide for normal people with small budgets - most of the articles I've seen about "large" drupal scaling seem to be for corporations with huge budgets.
Thanks so much for any insight you can provide,
Christopher Grant
Comments
Large budget is not necessary...
Some coding alone can add improvements in performance.
I upgraded my Drupal installation a few months ago to Pressflow. It is designed for scalability and performance.
https://launchpad.net/pressflow
========================
http://www.ministryofdrupal.org
Thank you for the suggestion
Thank you for the suggestion but I don't think I should migrate my site to a smaller subset of drupal - I expect my site to be around another 5 or even 10 years and I'm fairly certain the drupal community will exist within that timeframe but can't say the same about pressflow...
Anybody else have any words of wisdom or upgrade path suggestions?
To reiterate - what is the upgrade path for small/medium sites when they outgrow a vanilla VPS/dedicated server? Is it cacheing pages? Adding a reverse proxy? Moving search to a separate server? Moving storage to a service like S3? Using modules like boost to cache pages to files?
There are just soooooooooooo many options but most seem to be for companies with deep pockets (lots of money to spend). What can those of us who don't have much $$$ do once we outgrow our basic server?
Thanks so much for any suggestions,
Christopher Grant
I thought the same thing first...
You are right to worry about Pressflow not being around in a few years, but if you dig into the information a bit further, you will see that it is 100% cross-compatible with Drupal. It is NOT a subset, it is simply a tweaked-for-performance version. It is like putting a performance battery in a car; it is the same size and shape, but has more juice and lasts longer. You can always put an older battery back in the car later, and your car will still work.
Even if Pressflow stops being developed, you can simply swap the entire installation, file for file, folder for folder out to Drupal. To illustrate the compatibility of Pressflow, I literally deleted all the Drupal core files, dropped the Pressflow core files in, and kept running the site. The core and the database never even noticed the change, but the site performance did. It has speed and performance advantages by not supporting PHP4, which probably is not a problem with most hosting services and modules, and it supports caching systems, exactly one of the features you are looking for. So no, Pressflow is not for companies with a lot of money to spend, and no, there is no danger of losing Drupal compatibility.
https://answers.launchpad.net/pressflow/+faq/857
========================
http://www.ministryofdrupal.org