[consulting] Drupal server requirements

[Clara Hurst]

Gerhard Killesreiter wrote:

> Clara Hurst wrote:
>
>> We are writing a proposal for a client site with potential of  
>> 100,000 unique visitors per months.  The registered site users can be 
>> ranging from a few thousands to 10,000.   However, we expect at any 
>> given time there might be only up to a couple hundreds active users 
>> logged in,
>
>
> You mean they actually logged in and do something or there is just an 
> active session hanging around in the database? This is a major 
> difference.

We do  need to prepare the situation where there are couple 100s active 
sessions that are actually doing something. Although it is hard to 
predict what's  really going to happen, as their currently site (none 
drupal) user activities are fairly low so we don't want to over engineer 
it  - to scare the client away ;-), yet hope that we can have a platform 
that they can grow.  Being a consulting firm  we would like to provide a 
few pricing options so the client can choose their comfort-zone to 
invest,  yet have a clear understanding of what to expect etc.

So may be the question is what are the key factors for supporting  large 
# of active sessions  and what additional considerations we should have 
when those sessions are actually doing something.

I also started looking into what John Handelaar suggested in the 
previous message of using InnoDB rather than MyISAM.  and found this 
thread is quite interesting: http://drupal.org/node/47702

>>   the activities that the logged in users will do will mainly be:  
>> posting content, private messaging/contacting each others and 
>> downloading some white papers from the site etc.   We will use 
>> Organic Groups module so user roles are controlled via OG,
>
> No, node access  is controlled via OG. :p

yes, that's  what I meant :-D

>> we will also have multi-lingual support in the near future.
>>
>> We have not built any large drupal sites before, although there are 
>> some posts on the drupal.org but still feel very unease in terms of 
>> coming up with a set of server capacity requirements, any pointers or 
>> suggestions will be greatly appreciated. We are thinking of the 
>> following dedicate server configuration as a start, are we on track 
>> or too far off?
>>
>> - Intell 3.2 GHz P4 processor
>> - 2GB RAM
>> - plenty disk space
>> - RAID 1 for redundancy
>
> If you really have 100eds of active users doing stuff, it looks to me 
> like it very likely will not suffice. I am not an expert, though. 
> Drupal.org runs on better hardware (own db server for example) and has 
> not as many really active users.

I actually don't expect them to have the same level of activities  as 
what drupal.org has,  but this leads me to revisit the drupal 
infrastructure discussion happened last year -  I sort of forgot this 
information exist when busy writing proposals :-)  may be i should also 
read up on the infrastructure archive list  as well.  drupal.org site 
itself indeed provides a good benchmarking on whether we want to match 
up on the same performance or go lower.

thanks for the input  and keep your additional thoughts coming

Clara