Drupal Scalability
Hey. I'm looking at migrating a large instance of vBulletin (~15m posts, 10 page requests per second) to Drupal due to expanding requirements (tags, groups, blogs, collaborative content, etc). I was curious to see what the largest instance of Drupal was that uses the forum module extensively, and I think that's this site ( at ~200k posts).
So just a quick question about your system here. How many concurrent users (or page requests per second) do you have here and how many servers are you running to accommodate that load?
Any info would be awesome as I'd love to move away from the ugly code-base that is vBulletin.
decibel.places posted this at 00:14 — 27th September 2008.
He has: 1,494 posts
Joined: Jun 2008
Hello Brad,
Welcome to TWF!
A couple of weeks ago I met with developers at Northpoint Solutions in NYC.
They are running Drupal sites which are serving over 1,000,000 page views a minute at peak during certain campaigns.
They are separating dynamic and static content, streamlining some code, and using caching, memcache etc, and multiple distributed servers.
I would assume Northpoint could be hired as consultants, I do not know their rates nor your budget.
Sounds like you are involved in some interesting stuff and can contribute as well as learn here. Why don't you post an Introduction (a rite of passage here) to let us all know more about you
JeevesBond posted this at 04:27 — 27th September 2008.
He has: 3,956 posts
Joined: Jun 2002
Hi, welcome to the forums!
I have it on good authority that we are certainly not the largest board running Drupal.
Although the only other large one I know of is the Drupal.org forum itself.
Have you seen how the Drupal.org infrastructure is setup. There is some documentation available. It will also help you to look at this presentation on tuning MySQL for Drupal. MySQL tuning can really make the difference between a fast and slow site.
This site serves an average of 14,000 pages per day, which is nowhere near your 10 per second.
Just for reference: we're using a 'semi-dedicated' server from VPSVille (the Megacity 2 option). This handles the load with room to spare, even with serving 6 other sites from the same server. We found a VPS faster than the dedicated server we had before, since the site isn't doing anything particularly IO intensive.
a Padded Cell our articles site!
bradbeattie posted this at 05:15 — 27th September 2008.
They have: 2 posts
Joined: Sep 2008
Thanks for getting back to me on this. When I speak of 10 requests a second, that's only at peak load mid-day. That load obviously isn't sustained throughout a 24-hour period.
If you're serving up 14k pages a day on one semi-dedicated server, I gather I should be able to handle my load on 6 dedicated servers. Anywho, thanks for the feedback. Much appreciated.
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