Hi All,

We're considering Drupal as a possible new foundation for our sites, (as it has some great features and is so wonderfully customizeable) and I was wondering if anyone has any knowledge about/experience with using Drupal in a high-traffic, big-user environment they can help with as we're deciding which way to go.

I want to make sure I'm not barking up a tree that invlolves us buying a gazillion new server machines to serve our current audience with a drupal app.

Our Site Specs:

- Registered user community of between 250,000 and 500,000 members
- Up to 2 million visitor sessions/month, with an eye towards growing more yet.
- Generally up to 100 to 120 concurrent users at peak traffic periods.

Current machines:

2 dual 3.6 ghz intel processor linux apache webservers w/ 4 gb ram (w/ load balancing)
2 sunfire v240 2 x UltraSparcIII processors w/ 8 gb ram database servers running mysql

Is this enough power to serve the audience we have using a Drupal-based site? Or will Drupal require even more horsepower?

Thanks in advance,

LeCanard

Comments

cmsproducer’s picture

That shold be suffiecient. Mny of us run Drupal on hosted/shared servers and it works quite well. I have direct experience with an in-house server on WAMP that's getting about 20 concurrent users/anonymous and we are yet to add more sites that will get it to about 100. xeon 3+ghz b=with both the the apps and the DB on one PC...
So with your 'fancy' load balancing and non-windows OS, my opinion is that you will do just fine.

Drupal can be tweaked reduce load either by not installing certain inefficient modules, installing everything and using throttle to cut back certain unnecessary features when Drupal begins to be weighed down, or keeping everything and spending time to configure and tweak the application to hum along like a bee even with high traffic - you can use the Drupal DEVEL module to see what Drupal is doing (guts, DB queries and all) at any one time.

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iDonny - Web Content Management System Design, Development. & CRM

edrupalec’s picture

LeCanard,
can you provide more information? What modules do you plan to use? what will the logged in users be doing? Is the search module important? how many nodes? how many minutes per visit?

LeCanard’s picture

Thanks for the quick replies! They are definitely very helpful.

We're still in our scratching the surface phase of exploring Drupal (and the modules we'd need), but tentatively we are looking at using modules such as:

- Block, Filter, Forums, Comment Mover, Comments, Taxonomy, Flexinode, Locale (we need to be multi-lingual), Profile, Path, Throttle, User, Watchdog, Theme Editor, Sections, User Points

It's an interestig pijnt about modules too, that some are more fficient that others - are there any lists examining which modules have the best performance?

Site users would mainly be interacting with the system to either post comments in the forums, which will be a new site feature. As well we have loads of Flash content (hence our need for Flexinode) that 'logged in' users can use to register high scores for games, contests, votes and such. One of our big challenges will be fusing our current membership db with the Drupal membership model, which will pose an interesting programming challenge.

Games are our primary traffic driver and as a result, this pushes our Avg Visitor time to around 18 to 20 min.

Search is an intersting question, I would say that if it poses a heavy load to add searching, that I'd rather sacrifice it to get more mileage from other functionalities. Although it looks like the Node: Content Module could be interesting (There are also more content specific searches which are handled through independent flash content files).