Thanks for both the information and the encouragement! I have a cvs head version for my own testing, but I think I am going to stick with 4.6 for what we are rolling out to others. I am happy to contribute as I learn. I am moving my development notes off of our internal wiki and on to a public blog at http://www.citris-uc.org/blog/1, if anyone wants to keep up with my trials and tribulations. cheers, -tao Dries Buytaert wrote:
On 23 Nov 2005, at 22:43, Tao Starbow wrote:
Good point. Right now our infrastructure consists of a single dell poweredge (3GHz Xeno, 2GB ram, 70 GB scsi raid), running FreeBSD. We can pretty much dedicate this box to serving Drupal (apache and mysql on the same box). We are using the engineering department's network, so I am not worried about running out of bandwidth.
Looks like that machine should be able to host quite a few Drupal sites; I'm thinking 250 sites should be possible, but it obviously depends on a number of parameters as mentioned elsewhere in this thread. Fact is that many small sites scale better than one really big site; because each site is actually fairly small and reasonably static, Drupal's page caching mechanism should be very effective. (I'm somewhat puzzled by Ber's numbers and would like to know more about why he thinks otherwise.)
Creating "forward compatible modules" does not look like a practical option. It's better to stick with Drupal 4.6 and to upgrade to Drupal 4.7 when the time is right. Upgrading to Drupal 4.7 (including custom modules) should be relatively straightforward but might take a bit of time depending on the amount of custom changes and custom modules. One thing you can do is start off with PHPTemplate-based themes rather than XTemplate-based themes; PHPTemplate will be the default theme engine in Drupal 4.7.
If you are somewhat adventurous you could start out with Drupal CVS HEAD (the forthcoming Drupal 4.7); it shouldn't be too bad if you stick with core modules. A good formula for success is to participate in the development of Drupal; you'll quickly learn the ins and outs and will be able to weight decisions much more efficiently.
Tao, some of us (including myself) are very interested in improving Drupal's multi-site features. It is inevitable that you'll run into some gotchas so I'm hoping you'll participate in the development of said feature. (Eg. Adrian has been working on a patch to lock or restrict certain settings.) So welcome on board, and looking forward to your contributions. ;)
-- Dries Buytaert :: http://www.buytaert.net/