voter file

Recently went through an import of 2.4 million voter file records into CiviCRM. Went through a lot of testing, sharing some preliminary information here on things we discovered. The 'we' used in this document refers to me and other resources within my company, Trellon. Working with recent releases of CiviCRM 1.4.

First, default CiviCRM distros are not suitable for working with massive numbers of records. After importing the 2.4 million records, and before adding any custom fields, the main and advanced search interfaces became unusable. Trying to save information into a contact record became nearly impossible. The reasons for this were myriad and included database design, data access queries, as well as the hardware we were working with initially.