Hi there. I am using SS since two years and most of the sites I made with it are less than 100 pages per site.

Currently I am facing a larger site starting with ~1,000 pages and perhaps growing up to 3K or more. I read a lot of the other postings about large sites here. Many are helpful but the majority is for old versions of SS.

Thus I tested SS on my local machine with 3,000 pages each filled with 500 characters for the content (that's roughly what the text content will be). SiteTree looks like this:
Home
About
Sub1
-Sub1.1 (holds 100 pages)
-Sub1.2 (holds 100 pages)
-Sub1.3 (holds 150 pages)
-Sub1.4 (holds 150 pages)
-Sub1.5 (holds 150 pages)
-Sub1.6 (holds 150 pages)
-Sub1.7 (holds 150 pages)
-Sub1.8 (holds 150 pages)
-Sub1.9 (holds 150 pages)
-Sub1.10 (holds 200 pages)
-Sub1.11 (holds 200 pages)
-Sub1.12 (holds 200 pages)
-Sub1.13 (holds 200 pages)
-Sub1.14 (holds 200 pages)
-Sub1.15 (holds 200 pages)
-Sub1.16 (holds 200 pages)
-Sub1.17 (holds 200 pages)
Top2
Top3
(…)
Top99
Top100
Contact

Loading the back-end (Pages) will take about 9 seconds. Opening subfolders takes about 6 seconds. Pretty fast, in my opinion. :-)

My question now …
1. What about if there are more fields for the pages (about 15 fields for images, simple checkboxes and other HTML text)? Does it make loading back-end slower, or will SS load the content not until I click on a specific page?
2. What do I need to consider as well? I am fairly new to sites in this scale.
3. Should I think of building a module instead of pages (the site is more like a catalogue)?
4. Is there anything I can push the performance to be better?

Hope some of you can help and give me some answers or hints.
Thanks!
- suntrop -

Hi suntrop,

nice work!

1. What about if there are more fields for the pages (about 15 fields for images, simple checkboxes and other
HTML text)? Does it make loading back-end slower, or will SS load the content not until I click on a specific page?

give it a go, I'd love to see more performance stats!

2. What do I need to consider as well? I am fairly new to sites in this scale.

I'd look into http://www.ssbits.com/tutorials/2010/dataobjects-as-pages-part-1-keeping-it-simple/

3. Should I think of building a module instead of pages (the site is more like a catalogue)?

Could look into using something like silvercart and then removing the ecommerce part (e.g. buy now button)

4. Is there anything I can push the performance to be better?

better server?

Hi,

interesting topic! :)

4. Is there anything I can push the performance to be better?

Did you install X-Cache like recommended on http://doc.silverstripe.org/sapphire/en/installation/server-requirements?
If not yet it would be great t know in the difference for your test before and after.
Same question for Mysql Cache http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/query-cache.html? Is this one recmommended by SilverStripe, btw.?

Regards
SF

Thanks for your comments and links. I'll try to expand the pagetype to more fields this weekend and see what happens.
Since I am using a managed server with PHP as CGI, x-cache isn't making it faster. But I noticed there is FastCGI as an option. Again I'll try that this weekend.
Some weeks ago we launched a website for stock ratings. We are managing the stocks (45 DB fields) within a module and tested it with over 50,000 stocks. No performance issues at all – neither in front-end nor in the back-end :-)

Hope anybody is interested :)
- Added 18 text fields
- Added 15 checkboxes
- Added 1 HTMLText field
- Added 6,000 versions (SiteTree_Versions)
- Added 1,100 links (dependent pages) from subpages to the homepage
- Added another 1,000 pages

Without any caching it loads quite fast.
"Pages" section: ~ 6-8 seconds
Search for files (5 results): < 5 seconds
Search for files (100 results): < 7 seconds
Opening nested files: < 5 seconds

On my local machine PHP doesn't run in CGI mode. I hope I can try this the next days on my webserver. And I'll try to cache pages as well.

Awesome information... it seems a little slow for today market... if you have 3 levels of pages and you needs to get to a specfic page and then save & publish. Have you tried http://www.ssbits.com/tutorials/2012/dataobject-as-pages-the-module/ ?

I suspect that this will allow much better management of pages via searching and quicker to save & publish.

Save and Save & Publish is as fast as I know within sites up to 50 pages.
swaiba, your link is on my "read later" panel :-)

Oops, sory, this was meant for another thread -> http://www.silverstripe.org/installing-silverstripe/show/61005