[support] What is the largest Drupal site as far as the number of rows within the node table and how is the performance?

[Larry Garfield]

The only place where node count would have a strong negative correlation 
to performance would be if you had some inefficient, unindexable 
queries.  In that case, more nodes/records => slower queries.  If your 
queries can all leverage proper indexes, however, then you should be 
able to scale to a few hundred thousand nodes, or a million nodes, 
without too much trouble.  My largest site is closing in on 500k nodes, 
and all of the performance problems I've ever run into have been due to 
bad/stupid queries or brain-dead PHP code.  (I recall CCK in D5 does a 
select on all nodes that a nodereference could possibly point to for 
validation.  If you have 400,000 nodes, that will die.  That's not an 
SQL problem, that's a CCK in Drupal 5 was brain-dead stupid problem. <g>)

If your site is mostly anonymous, then that doesn't matter much as most 
pages will be cached anyway.  Throw varnish in front of it and you will 
rarely even be bootstrapping Drupal.

If you need to get more performance out of a site for authenticated 
users, switch to memcache for caching (saves wear and tear on the SQL 
DB), leverage Views caching, and build your site with Panels to get the 
per-pane caching options.  (Page caching has no effect for authenticated 
users.)

There's a TON that goes into performance optimization.  Content size is 
way down on the list. :-)

--Larry Garfield

On 07/28/2011 02:57 PM, Dipen wrote:
> This comes up a lot and logically and technically I don't really find 
> pressing co-relation between number of nodes and performance of the 
> site. I always view performance as types of pages on the site (panels, 
> views, full node), types and number of modules used, type of traffic 
> (authenticated vs anonymous) but have failed to find reasons that a 
> site with more number of nodes will suffer performance wise in a 
> considerable way, yes the table size would be large, number of rows 
> will be more so yeah there is lag in seek time but really that doesn't 
> matter much I feel ( and I may be totally off ).
>
> To cut short, is there a rationale to co-relate number of nodes to 
> performance? If yes, in what ways. I might be missing something really 
> basic, but then yeah I have been asked this many times and I usually 
> dont give much weight-age to number of nodes. I feel its more imp to 
> asses num and types of modules used, types of pages on the site ( is 
> the site too much panels, views dependent ) and type of traffic.
>
> Would love to hear your thoughts.
>
> P.S My experience so far is with a site around 100-110k nodes.
>
> Cheers
>
> On Fri, Jul 29, 2011 at 1:03 AM, Gregg Marshall 
> <mimlist at repconnection.com <mailto:mimlist at repconnection.com>> wrote:
>
>     I think it was on the Pressflow website I read about the
>     modifications to
>     Drupal.org in a comparison table.
>
>     Gregg Marshall
>
>     -----Original Message-----
>     From: support-bounces at drupal.org
>     <mailto:support-bounces at drupal.org>
>     [mailto:support-bounces at drupal.org
>     <mailto:support-bounces at drupal.org>] On
>     Behalf Of Brett Evanson
>     Sent: Thursday, July 28, 2011 3:26 PM
>     To: support at drupal.org <mailto:support at drupal.org>
>     Subject: Re: [support] What is the largest Drupal site as far as
>     the number
>     of rows within the node table and how is the performance?
>
>     If you're looking for drupal performance, look at Mercury or
>     Pressflow. Those are great places to start.
>
>     Brett Evanson
>
>
>
>
>
>     On Thu, Jul 28, 2011 at 1:16 PM, Gregg Marshall
>     <mimlist at repconnection.com <mailto:mimlist at repconnection.com>> wrote:
>     > And I vaguely remember reading somewhere that Drupal.org is not
>     a stock
>     > Drupal installation but has been modified to aid its performance.
>     >
>     > Gregg Marshall, CPMR, CSP, CMC
>     >
>     > -----Original Message-----
>     > From: support-bounces at drupal.org
>     <mailto:support-bounces at drupal.org>
>     [mailto:support-bounces at drupal.org
>     <mailto:support-bounces at drupal.org>] On
>     > Behalf Of Earnie Boyd
>     > Sent: Thursday, July 28, 2011 1:03 PM
>     > To: support at drupal.org <mailto:support at drupal.org>
>     > Subject: Re: [support] What is the largest Drupal site as far as the
>     number
>     > of rows within the node table and how is the performance?
>     >
>     > John Mitchell wrote:
>     >> What is the largest Drupal site as far as the number of rows
>     within the
>     > node
>     >> table and how is the performance?
>     >
>     > Uhhmm, I would guess drupal.org <http://drupal.org> to best fit
>     answer for that question and
>     > you can see the performance for yourself.  Now it is run by top
>     notch
>     > server guru's who know how to tune the performance which is what you
>     > need for a heavy hitting site.
>     >
>     > --
>     > Earnie
>     > -- http://progw.com
>     > -- http://www.for-my-kids.com
>     > --
>     > [ Drupal support list | http://lists.drupal.org/ ]
>     >
>     > --
>     > [ Drupal support list | http://lists.drupal.org/ ]
>     >
>     --
>     [ Drupal support list | http://lists.drupal.org/ ]
>
>     --
>     [ Drupal support list | http://lists.drupal.org/ ]
>
>

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