Monday
Sep172007
Scalable CMS?
Monday, September 17, 2007 at 11:50AM
What do you guys think/know about the scalability of the popular CMSs (like Joomla, Drupal or Typo3)?
Any experience/suggestions there?
I'm not sure which to pick yet...
Thanks,
Stephan
Any experience/suggestions there?
I'm not sure which to pick yet...
Thanks,
Stephan
Reader Comments (12)
A few big sites like http://www.theonion.com use Drupal, so it's possible, I just don't think it's easy. The whole module thing where every module performs separate queries would seem to make scalability difficult. Some sources: http://opensourcecommunity.org/2007/04/02/making-drupal-scale-drupal-beginner">Making Drupal Scale as a Drupal Beginner and http://www.workhabit.org/how-do-you-support-500-000-users-drupal">How do you support 500,000 users with Drupal?. Personally, if I thought I was going to be the next Digg, I would roll my own. But if your needs are more moderate, it's hard to beat the convenience. On a VPS Drupal may be the least of your worries. My problems have been with MySQL and Apache using too much memory, not so much Drupal.
sombody knows something about scalable moodle??
How much is involved if I want to "roll my own"?
Do you think it's critical to add all the bells & whistles features that a Drupal-based or other mainstream site has (Facebook, MySpace, Yahoo Answers) ?
My sense is that rolling out an original would look a lot like Web 1.0...while that may have worked for PlentyOfFish...it may not in all situations.
On the other hand......what you say Todd about core functionality being processed in separate modules, and that limiting scalability, makes sense. So I'm thinking that if I DO plan to launch the next Digg, I should scrap boxed CMS's altogether.
But I'm not sure. Thoughts anybody, please?
Thanks.
Jason
Jason,
You dont have to roll-one completely yourself.
You can build on frame-works that are designed to be build up upon.
For example. zend framework if you have to go PHP.
It will give you all the framwork power and a blank canvas.
framework.zend.com
A good example of drupal scalability is drupal.org which from what alexa is "saying" has a large volume of traffic (so the next DIGG could be drupal based).
Not to mention my own little stupid site which has grown quite a bit in the last weeks thanks to Todd also (Thanks Todd!)
Off topic: Don't know if anybody noticed, but there are some links inside Stephen's post that are not quite highscalability material. (try clicking on the highlighted letters in the post)
Todd please check this out :)
Kind regards,
Marcel
Joomla is a great option! I have been using Joomla for almost 3 years now, and it's a solid product. Now you have to know what your doing with any product/language of course. Part of a good scale out has to do with just tweaking things, finding a balance.
I currently have two dedicated servers that run MyPraize.com, we do any where from 10 to 50 million visits in a month during peak. We utilize between 1-2 TB of data transfer a month. And we have about 110,000 registered users. The largest issues with scaling for MyPraize has been optimizing queries in Joomla, downloaded components, and my own components. Second biggest hurdle is optimizing the database by organizing tables correctly, using correct column types and most importantly, INDEXED INDEXES INDEXES.... lol :-)
more like 100 visitors a month: http://www.alexa.com/data/details/main/mypraize.com
Your urls aren't even optimized (go to setting in joomla admininistrator-webGUI and check the SEF links option, after you modified your .htaccess)
50 million visits a month :) only two servers what is your secret?
My personal preference is with Joomla, but there a some high profile companies building sites in Joomla but not with that kind of scale of traffic and visitors. I have yet to hear of a site that is doing as high traffic and mypraize.com looks like the first :)
We running a little show over at our http://www.wowjoomla.com">joomla tutorial service
Interesting article especially the random PORN links embedded in the first paragraph. Hmmm?
You have made the basics pretty clear in your first paragraph Todd!
Joomla is getting a lot of famous nowadays and it is better if one implements his approach more towards this rather than others
-----
http://underwaterseaplants.awardspace.com">sea plants
http://underwaterseaplants.awardspace.com/seagrapes.htm">sea grapes...http://underwaterseaplants.awardspace.com/plantroots.htm">plant roots
I think you can use almost any CMS you want as long as you go by a few simple rules. . .
1. Supporting authenticated users is very tricky. Try to not use authenticated users.
2. Caching, caching and more caching. Once you cache is cached, make sure that cache is cached in another cache, and then cache that. So good ways to do that (in Drupal) is with using Drupal cache, Authcache, Varnish, APC, Memcached, Akamai, and Solr. Using all of these techs will allow you to scale (really, you can scale just about anything using this).
3. Combining the above with MySQL sharding and caching you can serve a site that has a lot of visitors.