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@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@drupal.org [mailto:support-bounces@drupal.org] On
Behalf Of Brett Evanson
Sent: Thursday, July 28, 2011 3:26 PM
To: support@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@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@drupal.org [mailto:support-bounces@drupal.org] On
> Behalf Of Earnie Boyd
> Sent: Thursday, July 28, 2011 1:03 PM
> To: support@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 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/ ]
>
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