Thread

Jamie,

Thanks again for the detailed and very helpful info.  Running my whole site in EE still sounds promising, although I continue to waffle - mostly due to EE inexperience.  I’ll make the call after I’ve played around with EE more and researched the integrated EE & custom database alternative.  Besides performance I also have to consider issues like exports as I may need to share data with one or more sites.  With luck, maybe EE v. 2 will appear soon and make my decision easier?!  One can dream….

Any chance you can post URL’s for the sites you’ve discussed?  Or maybe by email or PM?

Hey there: 

Check out TrendHunter.com.  Some of my numbers are similar to what you are scoping… I used EE to start, but as traffic strated to skyrocket, I rewrote all of my pages to use php queries.

10,000 entries
25,000 images
30 custom fields
12 magazines that drive off the same database

Cheers,
JG

Check out TrendHunter.com.  Some of my numbers are similar to what you are scoping… I used EE to start, but as traffic strated to skyrocket, I rewrote all of my pages to use php queries.

10,000 entries
25,000 images
30 custom fields
12 magazines that drive off the same database

Numbers like this are really not where I would focus my eye.  They are just pieces of data in MySQL or in the file system on the server.  Those two things are always scaleable.  There are ExpressionEngine based sites out there with double and triple those numbers that are not using PHP queries at all.  Instead, it is about designing your site well and having an intelligent person behind the servers.

Summary of this thread from my viewpoint:

1) EE is plenty capable of running big sites with lots of traffic. 

2) EE sites that require 100+ custom fields and 10’s of relationships *may* have performance issues.  Performance is most likely to suffer if many custom fields and relationships have to be pulled onto one template.

3) EE performance issues associated with #2 can probably be addressed by writing “raw” queries (with or without Query Module) and having intelligently managed and reasonably powerful servers.

In my case, I don’t have any choice but to pull ~100 custom fields (some with relationships) into a single-entry template and ~10 custom fields (some with relationships) into multi-entry templates.  Thus, if I run my whole proposed site with EE, I clearly need to consider that some raw queries are likely. 

BTW, I still haven’t had time to investigate the alternative of integrating EE with a custom DB - more specifically a custom set of interrelated mysql tables in the same DB as EE.  I’d be grateful if anyone wants to shorten my research and share key threads or experience with integrating EE and non-EE tables.

My thanks to all who’ve participated in this thread (so far).  The EE community is pretty amazing!