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General Questions /

General questions about getting started with SilverStripe that don't fit in any of the categories above.

Moderators: martimiz, Sean, Ed, biapar, Willr, Ingo, swaiba

How much can Silverstripe handle?


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9 Posts   4611 Views

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Martijn

Community Member, 271 Posts

25 July 2009 at 4:54am

Edited: 25/07/2009 4:56am

Hi all,

Im playing with Silverstripe now for about two weeks and I really love the framework and the cms implementation.
I'm now at the point that I seriously consider Silverstripe as my main framework. Most of the sites will be not very big. Lets say around 30 pages and maybe 6 or 7 pagetypes and some datamodels and need to handle around 100-200 visitors daily.

I run one small jobboard for the Netherlands based on a Joomla cms, which serves around 800 pages to 3000 visitors daily and around 100 users adding and editing content. This is hosted on a VPS server without any caching. And I wondered if Silverstripe could handle the same, (what I really hope!)

But reading this topic, I got a little tempered in my enthusiasm. Probably undeserved.
So I came up with a sort of benchmark/comparison idea.

My question to all SS users on this forum:

1. How many visitors do you daily handle with a Silverstripe CMS?
2. Around how many pages (pagetypes, datamodels) do you serve with that install?
3. Did you use special caching configuration?
4. Can you tell something about the hosting environment (Shared, VPS, dedicated?)
5. Does Silverstripe do the job with your setup and the amount of visitors?

Thanks in advance!

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Carbon Crayon

Community Member, 598 Posts

25 July 2009 at 5:18am

Hi Martijn

The largest site I have made is an intranet for a company I used to work for. It has around 2500 pages (and growing) and up to 500 users. I have had huge problems with performance, which I have had to work around at the cost of security (luckily being an intranet it's not a huge issue). The server it is running on is an internal dedicated 8 core, 8GB machine over a wired 100mb network, which given the other post you reference is a pretty good job as it has around 120 database tables with 10,000's of entries.

The biggest 2 problems are trying to use groups for per-page user permissions which are not admins and the files and images section.

Groups - If logging in as a user which is not an admin, loading the admin section would take upwards of 60 seconds, then expanding a single tree item with say 20 sub items would take another 20-30 seconds. An admin however would be as fast as if you had a single page, taking mayb 5-10 seconds to load the admin area then 1-2 upto 5 seconds to expand tree items.
I can only assume that this is due to the way SS checks permissions on pages. It's a serious issue because as far as I can imagine the only time you would really have lots of groups is when you have lots of pages and sections!
Solution - Every group is now a subgroup of administrator and permissions are set by targeting the group names in the page type class. I have also had to just hide the security tab in the admin area. Of course the generally means that every one can edit everything, which again luckily isnt too much of a problem in this situation, but I can image it would be in almost any other similar context.

Files & Images - The assets folder now has 1000s of images, videos and files in it and it is literally unusable. Loading the interface takes 30+ seconds then expanding each folder takes at least another 30s.
Solution - Use the Moxicode ImageManager plugin for TinyMCE which is super quick and very usable, and even has bulk uploading in windows. You access it via a button on the WYSYWIG editor toolbar. The only major issue then is that SS wont pick up any files uploaded through this for it's file dropdown menus untill you visit the files and images section! :'(

Overall it's not particularly promising for a multiuser large site. Hopefully scalability can be addressed in future as it seems to be limiting a great system from being truly competitive at this level.

Hope that helps

Aram

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Willr

Forum Moderator, 5523 Posts

25 July 2009 at 11:51pm

1. How many visitors do you daily handle with a Silverstripe CMS?

We can handle about 2500 visitors a day without anything special. SilverStripe.org and SilverStripe.com both get quite solid traffic and apart from mod_deflate? we don't run anything special. As soon as you get heavy traffic (5,000+) that or into complex / dynamic sites you are likely to run into some issues. Most of the performance load is database querying so if you minimize that you can scale the site a bit better. With static caching SS can easily serve as many views are you can throw at it which is fine if all you are doing is displaying content. Permissions checking and member interacting all cause significant load.

4. Can you tell something about the hosting environment (Shared, VPS, dedicated?)

Shared would be fine for your smaller sites but I preferred to setup a VPS to serve my ~5 smaller sites as it has a bit more flexibility then a shared host. Your larger sites would ideally be on dedicated boxes as it will probably be under a decent amount of load.

3. Did you use special caching configuration?

Static Caching if useful. Mod Deflate - http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/mod/mod_deflate.html

Overall it's not particularly promising for a multiuser large site. Hopefully scalability can be addressed in future as it seems to be limiting a great system from being truly competitive at this level.

Yes aram, this issue has been discussed internally increasingly often. These large sites are new territory for SilverStripe so it has a few teething issues on the whole scalability thing but work in this area is defiantly on the horizon.

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Martijn

Community Member, 271 Posts

28 July 2009 at 9:35am

Edited: 28/07/2009 9:36am

Hi Aram, Hi Will,

Thanks both of you for your replies!

As far as I can judge right now Silverstripe will do the job quite solid with good caching and not to many usergroups and different grouppermissions. ( I'll leave the jobboard for what it is at the moment :) ).

Another issue seems to be that a lot of pages will slow down the treemenu generation.
Willr: Do you second Aram about the slow treemenu with a lot of items in it, even when there are not so many usergroup permissions?

I think that the with use of the dataobjectmanager I can decrease the amount of pagetypes in the sitetree , but access the data with the controllers (when no permissioncontrol is needed for each page).

Still the flexibility of SS is a very big pro ( I really should go to bed earlier this week), and for smaller websites I already know that I will use Silverstripe for shure.

Thanks for you input and this great framework (and the IRC channel)!

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TerryMiddleton

Community Member, 108 Posts

28 July 2009 at 1:07pm

willr,

How did the Democratic National Convention handle all the hits it got in a very short period of time? This is a huge site with more traffic than people in the world (well almost).

Terry

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Willr

Forum Moderator, 5523 Posts

28 July 2009 at 2:46pm

@TerryMiddleton - most of the site was served statically - as in the cms generated html files for the site rather then hitting the db for each request. With this approach you can quite easily scale up to such large numbers, combined with serving it over multiple servers it handled everything quite well. The webstreaming was handled by thirdparties so we did not manage that.

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martimiz

Forum Moderator, 1391 Posts

29 July 2009 at 12:16am

Hi all
Just to be sure - would a site with around 200 pages but few visitors (say around 50-100 daily, each requesting maybe 30 pages) on shared hosting be considered 'heavy' without serving static content?

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Martijn

Community Member, 271 Posts

29 July 2009 at 8:53am

Edited: 29/07/2009 8:54am

Hi Martimiz,

On an average sharedhosting server, I don't think that will be a problem.

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