Thread

Had a query from a client the other day that wanted to update a 50,000 strong members site.

I know that scale will be limited by the server power behind the thing and any maximum sizes for MySQL database tables (given that all weblog data / titles etc are stored in shared rather than separate tables per weblog).

What’re the biggest sites that EE has handled and what special measures needed to be taken to manage them if any?

Hi there,

If you take a look at this very site for instance then this has over 61,000 members. These are just rows in a table though and any MySQL server should be able to cope with literally millions of rows of data so that’s not really where any inherent problems would lie if any.

ExpressionEngine like many other publishing systems is quite capable of handling massive amounts of data as long as the server is tuned correctly for the job at hand. If you are on a shared server with other sites then this has to be taken into hand obviously but if you have a really good server and good server support then they should be able to get you an environment set up that will allow you to handle significant amounts of traffic.

Really at the end of the day it always comes down to how good and how well set up your server is.

Hope that helps a bit.

Best wishes,

Mark

Cheers Mark,

I get that the server tuning is important (indeed probably key) to hosting a very large site - hence my comment about server power. I’d probably look to enginehosting if I needed to deal with a site of this scale as they deal with these sorts of issues everyday and know the platform inside and out.

I guess what I’m really asking is, aside from that, in realworld situations, what steps have people taken to manage their very large sites (and how large have they been?)

I know there’s lots you can do with caching and being careful with the code used in templates etc. but I wonder whether people have had to take any other measures.

Here is my two cents….I also would like to start a discussion elsewhere here as to server and EE tuning…and continue it along.

My thoughts is that the amount of Members means little. I am speaking mostly of the Discussion Forum, since that is my primary use. So it is not the amount of members, but the actual USE of the site by both members and non-members. It is also the AGE of the site. Follow me for a minute…..

Even non-members who come to our site tax the server. They search and browse through the threads in our forum, causing LOTS of sql queries, plus the usual php and ad serving, etc.

In addition, I think the the NUMBER OF POSTS and LENGTH OF THREADS can have something to do with it. We have been running the forums for almost 4 years, so there are LOTS of very long threads and hundreds of thousands of posts and replies. I think all of this has to be sorted every time a user does just about anything.

When I first bought EE, I asked whether the Forum ever archived the old threads…..but was told it didn’t. I wonder if such a scheme might not be wise in the future - that, for instance, posts or threads over 2 or 3 years old could be stored in a way that only searches would bring them out (not every listing of every forum or thread).....

I am not a technical person, but that is my off-the-cuff guess at what is causing our server load to increase substantially.

OK, so we use EE on a dedicated Gentoo Box…...dual core 3.0 MHZ - quite a bit of RAM and fast enough connection.

The EE part of the site is seeing as many as 500+ users/guests/visitors at one time. Maybe only 120 are logged in, but they are very busy…clicking around. People tend to hang out and read a lot!

We are seeing from 10,000 to 15,000 visitors per day to the site, and up to 75,000 page views (mostly EE, some static).

The UNIX server load specs are running from 2 to 4…and sometimes to 5, but assuming that we have dual cores (if they count as 2), that means a very doable load.

If I read the charts correctly, we have about 10 gigs a day being served out - and no big files, mostly the forums.

Hopefully that will give you a handle on what we are doing in terms of a medium scale.

Rumor has it that Obama’s campaign site is running on EE

http://ellislab.com/forums/viewthread/85189/