By elcrisol on

What are the minimum and the optimal hardware requirements? Is there a relation between visits, users, posters and the hardware? Thank you.

Comments

tosh-1’s picture

tosh-1 commented

I am currently running www.tosh.is-a-geek.com on a Pentium 133 with 24 meg of ram on a very tight and clean Debian LAMP set-up. I had taken Simple Machine Forums for a test drive and it seemed to run fine, but it wasn't what I was looking for. When I heard about spreadfirefox.com running CivicSpace I did my homework and decided to try Drupal.

My experience is that it is functional but slow on such a low-power machine. The general user experience is not bad, but administration tasks are slow. A ram upgraded will definitely speed things up, and that will be my next experiment.

asb’s picture

asb commented

I'm currently evaluating Drupal 4.6 myself and trying to figure out, where the bottlenecks are. My installation runs on a dedicated host, but with low-end hardware (Intel Celeron 2.4 GHz, 512 MB RAM); this is *very* slow and not useful for a public site. Slow means: ist takes 16-20 seconds, before Drupal *starts* to deliver a page (measured with 1 user, approx 20-30 guests); for "live" operation, I'd expect at least 200 to 500 guests which will be impossible with this hardware.

For comparison purposes: There are two other applications running on the machine: MediaWiki, and Gallery2; MediaWiki takes 3-4 sec. to deliver a complete page, Gallery2 is even faster (2-3 sec. for a page with lots of images). When a Drupal page is requested, the CPU load jumps from 2-5% to 95-100% for about 15 secs.; the physical memory is used to capacity at 95% or even higher. Gallery2 or MediaWiki seem not to be disturbed by this, but Drupal is.

The problem with Drupal seems to be some interactions between and/or the amount of installed modules, but given that we want to use at least some, I'd like to figure out, what would be need. Our combination is definitely [too] CPU-intensive (active are: aggregator, amazon, archive, article, atom, badbehavior, blog, book, bookreview, comment, contact, db_maintenance, diff, feedback, filemanager, folksonomy, forum, forward, gallery, gsitemap, help, image, image_filter, image_import, locale, menu, menu_otf, moviereview, node, nodevote, nodewords, page, path, pathauto, poll, print, profile, project, quicktags, quotes, recipe, search, spam, story, taxonomy, taxonomy_multi_edit, throttle, trackback, tracker, upload, urlfilter). I haven't found yet an overview about how CPU-intensive these modules are and which would slow the normal operation down significantly.

After reading http://drupal.org/node/26707, it seems that a fast Drupal site with some amount of functionality beyond the core modules (like drupal.org :-) needs a pretty big iron; currently, loading a page from the Drupal site takes approx. 6 sec. with 170 users and 2683 guests - thats quite impressive.

I'd appreciate it very much, if other users of Drupal could share their experiences, which hardware is needed for what pupose and/or which modules. Or maybe there is a thready like this already which I haven't found yet?