NYCPHP Meetup

[Mitch Pirtle]

On 5/20/07, David A. Roth <rothmail at comcast.net> wrote:
> A friend of mine who is a webmaster wants to use Joomla to serve his
> membership of a not-for-profit trade organization. He had some
> questions about Joomla, which I wasn't able to readily produce metrics
> to properly answer him and ease his concerns. His main concerns were
> about capacity. While I had a feeling Joomla would be able to handle
> all his needs, I want to pass along some numbers to back up my feeling.

I've personally been involved in Joomla-powered commerce sites with
>350k pageviews daily, as well as some internal sites with thousands
of user accounts. Joomla can scale, and with minimal effort can scale
to a pretty big extreme.

> Q: What is Joomla's capacity for the number of registered users? Is
> this limited by the hardware resources, or is there a limit that at
> some point either Joomla using MySQL can't handle it, or performance
> greatly suffers? What might be that limit? A 100k? A million? A
> billion? Limited by available disk space on device?

Theoretically speaking, you're limited to your deployment and how you
got MySQL setup.

>From real experience, you will exceed your threshold for pain with the
admin interface well before you start pushing MySQL or Joomla from an
infrastructure perspective.

For example, the last thing you want is a dropdown of usernames when
you got >10,000 to cram in that list... hehe

> Q: What is Joomla's capacity to handle simultaneous users, or is this
> limited by the hardware/OS resources?

Again, the limitations of the infrastructure are probably rediculously
far out there to worry about. However, you will need to make some
modifications in order to manage load-balancing, as well as some
modifications to the default admin template in order to manage that
much data.

Ultimately what becomes your biggest issue is how much you rely on the
admin interface to manage such a large pile of stuff. Remember that
one of the strengths of Joomla is its flexibility; and you're free to
create your own admin template - and therefore also admin "screens"
that are specific to the scale of your site's requirements.

> It would also help to have some URLs of high traffic Joomla web sites
> to pass along to him as an example.

I've recently contributed memcache storage for both sessions and
caching storage to the 1.5 tree, and combine that with some simple
work to facilitate load-balanced environments, you can take Joomla 1.5
to pretty big extremes.

I'm currently building a site based on the 1.5 framework (not using
the CMS) for a site that gets around 40M pageviews every week. Would
love to do a case study at a future NYPHP event if I pull it off ;-)

Once this is done, I'm starting up a high-traffic Joomla group
specifically to deal with such issues, as there are a lot of media
companies that are attracted to the attractive possibilities of using
Joomla as their base platform - and I'd like to provide that resource
to the community.

-- Mitch