Thread

Hi,

We’re in the process of evaluating EE as a potential new CMS foundation for our site, and I had a few questions about licensing and scalability.

We run the following infrastructure set-up:

2 load-balanced webservers and 2 dedicated database servers. All servers are operated as virtual machines. Each webserver has its own storage, which is not shared. One of the web servers is designated as the primary server, for which content is sync’d across the machines every few minutes. We would dedicate one db machine to EE services.

The webserver virtual machines are set to use: 4 GB of RAM , and 4 CPUs each using Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E7430 @ 2.13GHz

The database server virtual machines each are set to use: 8 GB of RAM, and 4 CPUs each using Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E7430 @ 2.13GHz w/ 64 GB of storage.

Our site also utilizes Akamai CDN services to distribute the serving of static assets.

In terms of traffic load, our site can garner 2 million+ visitor sessions per month, with up 15 million+ page views generated. Our busiest times can feature up to the low hundreds of simultaneous users. We currently see a pretty low rate of resource usage on the servers, so we do have a bunch of available capacity.

Question 1) Is EE a workable solution for this kind of traffic and server set-up?

Question 2) From an administrative point of view, since the domain is distributed by Akamai, we edit the sites based on the IP address of the primary server (by-passing the CND) and ensuring that any content files written are on the primary server (so they don’t get overwritten/deleted). Is this workflow still possible using EE? We’ve used WordPress for blog uses, and find that this is a hugely complicating factor, since you must do your wordpress admin on designated domain, not it’s IP address.

Question 3) In terms of licensing, would we need to license one commercial copy of EE for the domain, or do we require one license of EE per server?

Insights would be very much appreciated!

Thanks in advance,

-paul

Hi Paul, and welcome to the forums!

You’ll need to be careful here, because you cannot have multiple copies of ExpressionEngine writing to a single database, even if they are only a few minutes apart. I wasn’t quite clear when you say you’re dedicating one database machine to EE, whether that was the case or not. EE will work fine with only IP addresses specified.

In terms of licensing, one license is good for one installation, which is typically the same as saying “the domain” since EE isn’t designed to have multiple copies running in tandem as per above. It’s certainly possible to run EE in load-balanced environments (EngineHosting does just this) but it needs to be transparent to the single application. Hope that makes sense.

Thanks for the reply, Brandon. That does help answer my initial questions. To clarify, we would be dedicating one of the db servers for use by EE, and we’d use a single installation of the software (ultimately moving add licensing to manage multiple sites on the one version). I’m glad to hear that we would be able to access the control panels via IP address.

However, I do have further follow-up questions based on the fact that we are a very high volume traffic site, as compared to most EE installs.

As I read some of the forums and articles (which are very helpful), I’m a worried that the max traffic level reference I can find seems to indicate a 20K to 30K visitors per day threshold. (To be fair this looks like it was referring to a 1.5 or 1.6 version of the engine). For us, a bad day is at least 35K visitors, and we need to be able to handle 125K visitors per day and still provide a fast and fully featured site experience to our users.

To handle this level of traffic, I’ve read that there ways we can leverage configuration of EE to ensure that we are running a more optimized EE system.

The things that immediately stand out to me are:

- disable all tracking (we use Omniture SiteCatalyst for analytics tracking)
- Avoid use of complex conditionals, sticking to {if} instead of {if:else}
- utilize caching - both via available features in EE and potentially adding plug-ins such as Solspace Static Page Caching—http://solsp.ac/e7L
- Use as few templates within templates to simplify the loading of each template
- Use as much flat file components as possible (to leverage our Akamai CDN services rather than the DB)

So, given our traffic levels, server details and potential tuning approach, can we count on EE to be a workable solution for our site? Or do we exceed the thresholds of the system without adding further server infrastructure? Is there a generally recognized traffic peak that an out-of-box E 2.x install can handle? Are there any other recommended resources that we can look to further explore how reduce the load to run the system?

I do like the look of the feature available in EE, but I do need to make sure that our content, if delivered via EE, is available during our peak traffic periods.

Thanks,

-paul

Just thought I’d chip in here - there’s a handy blog posts that lists some high traffic sites that run on EE at http://www.hopstudios.com/blog/the_largest_expressionengine_sites/

Thanks Rob, finding out who has rolled out high traffic deployments is always helpful!

-paul

Any other suggestions for maximum optimization?
This would suck if after all this work on the 11th hour we discover that things don’t run as smooth as we hoped for.

bmedeiros (and Paul)  - this is pretty much required reading as well: http://ellislab.com/blog/entry/troubleshooting_site_performance_issues/

Thanks Brandon, that’s a great resource to be able to access.

Thanks Brandon, that’s a great resource to be able to access.

I run one of those 1.7 sites - which tops at about 20,000 visitors per day…. (100,000 page views)

However, this may give you some indication of capability….

1. My server is a single server at one location…nothing fancy and not much tuning. The server is very similar to one of yours.
2. The server load is extremely low - it has never gotten to even 2 (top, uptime, etc) , which indicates I probably have a lot of running room.
3. 80% of our traffic is EE forum based - forum pages seem to use more objects than most other EE stuff.
4. We have had 600+ users on the site at one time - at least as measured by EE….

I won’t have the traffic to test it, but it seems to me that my single server could easily handle double the current max..and maybe more.

Using that as a rule of thumb, 2-4 tuned up servers with the specs and services you mentioned would seem to be able to do the job for you!

Great info, Craig. Thanks for sharing that!

Thanks Craig! It’s definitely helpful to be able to hear from operators of high traffic sites about the server load experiences.

We’ll definitely be reaching out to the enterprise services as well, to ensure we can develop on the right track.

Thanks again,

-paul

Thanks Paul. Let us know if you have any further questions.