Thread

Hi,

i wonder if EE is able to handle something like a news site with 50+ posts a day. I wonder if internal structures and stuff are able to handle these numbers. I guess related entries don’t make too much sense as i read they’re selected by dropdowns - and if these dropdowns contain 20.000+ posts some time later it would surely be kinda hard to handle.

Any epxeriences on that topic?

Thanks,
Frank

Ouch. A drop down with 20,000 posts would be a nightmare to navigate, and the difficulty would have not much to do with EE. Do you have a link to a site like that?

You could take any medium sized news site or a bigger blog that runs for a few years. 20.000+ articles isn’t that much basically and wordpress currently is able to handle this without any problems - though nothing like a related-posts dropdown is in action now - wordpress is finding similar posts itself via a plugin.

And yes i guess it has to do with EE as another solution next to the dropdown would be a autocomplete field or a search function for related posts. But that’s just an example. I don’t want to fixate on the related posts stuff. Is EE basically able to handle all that stuff or are there other, different problems that i have to expect with bigger databases and a bit more traffic (of course external caching will be in place as far as possible).

It’s been my experience that EE can handle anything WordPress can handle and much more. It’s not the number of articles that’s the issue, it’s having that many articles in a drop down menu.

Whew!

as already said this is not a topic around the dropdown field primarly (though this would be an issue of course) it’s about big sites with big databases, lots of articles and big traffic. What sites do you know or own that are a bit bigger and driven by ee?

Let’s let the EE folks chime in with a list of “bigger” sites, but the issue is NOT EE’s ability to handle it. It’s quickly a hardware and configuration issue for sites with tens of thousands of articles, high complexity, and heavy traffic.

but the issue is NOT EE’s ability to handle it

Sorry, i respect you beeing a fanboy of ee - i really love it myself, but how could you know if you’re not driving one of those bigger sites yourself?

Driving and handling bigger sites often brings lots of problems to the front you don’t see on even a bit smaller sites. Let it be searching single posts for editing, the search functions that reveilles problems when dealing with lots of thousands of posts.

Of course i know the perfomance issues that will surely come to front with 50-100k unique users a day but that isn’t a problem that is ee specific - that has to be solved with every system and it surely can be solved with every system.

Going with EE for a site like this is a hard and long lasting decision and possible problems should be discussed right before any work is done - that’s why i’m asking here.

It’s not an issue of being an EE fanboy. I like EE but I’ve put up far more sites on other platforms. EE is a sweet value for custom work.

I’ve been building and managing internet sites since 1995 on every platform imaginable. I designed and managed an e-commerce site with a few million registered users and over $200-million in annual revenue. The booking application was written in Tcl (tickle), which is far less capable or powerful than PHP is now. How could it handle the heavy traffic needed? Plenty of load balanced web servers, plenty of application servers, and a few giant, dedicated databases (not to mention a few dozen people to keep it all running).

Again, a site with tens of thousands of articles will not be a big deal on EE. The hardware will be the issue. A simple site like MacDailyNews probably has tens of thousands of articles but requires a lot more horsepower than a simple blog site. EE probably has other sites which are far larger, have more content, more complexity already than what you’ve outlined.

Drop a note to EE sales asking for a list, and drop one to Nevin at EngineHosting for additional detail. I don’t think you’ll be disappointed in EE’s capabilities.

As to creating a site that is “news” oriented, say, like CNN.com or USAToday.com, where the amount of content becomes enormous, and bells and whistles complex, there are far more organizational issues to contend with than whether PHP/MySQL can handle it, or whether EE can meet the requirements (whatever they might be; after all, EE is a “value” CMS and doesn’t come with all the bells and whistles of huge and complex sites like CNN.com or USAToday.com, but could compete quite well with the proper PHP resources).

In situations like this, it’s always best to outline in as much detail as possible all the requirements you can come up with, then match that to the resources you have available for the project, then match both to the various CMS tools available; trying out those that hold the most promise. EE might be overkill. It might not be sufficient. But know what you want to accomplish with some semblance of detail before making a commitment.

There are a lot of large, high profile, and heavy traffic sites powered by EE, some are known/published, some large enterprises do not like to publicly share what technology is the driving force behind their web properties, but you can read about some of them in different forum posts, and well as some mentioned here in a recent EE Blog post.

Being you also have the ability to easily rework sections using EE’s API hooks, if a certain section/feature in cases don’t work or handle your specific needs its possible to do it yourself, or higher a development group to custom write plugins/modules/extensions for the specific job/tasks you have too.

As every site is different, a generic “can it handle a large site” all depends on the projects needs, functionality, the developer implementing the site within EE, and so on.  A site with 10’s of thousands of posts (actually know of a specific project with over 1.2 million weblog entries), but little traffic is going to have completely different needs/concerns/issues than a site that has maybe thousands of articles, but sees millions of unique visitors per month and handling 10’s or 100’s of millions of page views per month would.

Likely the only way for you to know is a) do some testing in a development environment with test data, b) hire a development group that has experience rolling out EE in large scale environments (there are more than a few that are versed in this), or c) both.

RonnieMC & Nevin: Thanks for your answers. @RonnieMC: Glad to see you’re not angry with me naming you a fanboy 😉

Of course i see that it isn’t that easy to perfectly name any problems a big site (whatever big means) may have with Expression Engine but what i expected to hear is something like “If you got 250.000 Posts or more you may get problems using the search engine” or “if you get more then 250k uniques a day, better get yourself another 10 servers” ... you know. Something like “those are the most known problems in this cases”. The less “general problems” the better 😉

@Nevin: Thanks for the link to the blog post which contains some really interesting links to EE sites. Are there any more of the bigger ones - is there probably a list somewhere? Whom do i have to send a mail if this list is non-public?

Would love to see some more sites - especially some newspaper/magazine sites if possible.

Hey Helmi, we just did some work on a site that has over 30K weblog entries with associations and also running the FoxEE module and each entry has a related downloadable product. The drop downs are unruly but since they have separated the content into 4 categories they are somewhat manageable, plus once its set its not very often that you need to go back in and change anything. EE can handle it no problem. Like others have hinted, the main thing is concentrating on your site design and weblog structure. Hardware is always a consideration no matter what software you are using.

Nevin, thanks for the link to Dereks Blog post. I hadn’t seen that yet and it is very informative.

One thing you can do if you are worried about the drop-down size (sorry for side-stepping the main issue for a moment) is use the absolutely fantastic Related Entries module from Solspace.

This allows you to make relations using an AJAX search field so as long as you know what your entries are named (which you would need to anyway even if you were using a drop-down) then you just type in some words from the title(s) and the entries will show up and you can choose which ones you want to relate to your entry. A very smart way of doing things. Another thing you could probably use are tags but in a limited way but the Related Entries module really is great to get around those kinds of limitations.

Best wishes,

Mark

Thanks, Mark, that’s a valuable hint. Another great addition would be if the ajax field would not anly search post titles but also the body content for the search phrase/key.

Yep that would be nice although it is still a fantastic module / extension that one.

Hey Helmi, we just did some work on a site that has over 30K weblog entries with associations and also running the FoxEE module and each entry has a related downloadable product. The drop downs are unruly but since they have separated the content into 4 categories they are somewhat manageable, plus once its set its not very often that you need to go back in and change anything. EE can handle it no problem. Like others have hinted, the main thing is concentrating on your site design and weblog structure. Hardware is always a consideration no matter what software you are using.

Nevin, thanks for the link to Dereks Blog post. I hadn’t seen that yet and it is very informative.

As the in-over-my-head designer/developer of the site Mike’s referring to (Hey there, Mike! I should be finishing my add to carts instead of posting, but couldn’t resist.), I can say that the struggles I’ve had in putting a very large EE site (which is a news article/photo service, by the way) together had far more to do with trying to construct a database from the client’s previous poor setup/raw material and overly complicated business model than anything remotely related to EE. The most challenging things were finding solutions to balance the limitations of php, our hosting setup, and whatever automation was available to us vs. the client’s fear of new things and extra steps—but again, really, nothing to do with EE.