Best caching for thousands of authenticated users?

Posted by konrad1811 on November 26, 2010 at 10:58am

Hi.

Currently I'm developing drupal page (as knowing drupal on medium+ level) for ONLY authenticated users.

Aim is to get even more than 1 mln loged in users.

Site will be quite simple. Users can add some nodes, that are visible ONLY for their friends. Users can search (currenlty using views filter) for a node (still ONLY their friends nodes), and can watch others friends profile (with nodes friend submitted).

I think that all page should be cached exept searching result. And if a user submitted a new node his profile should be updated (cache cleared).

So 2 core things are:

maximum fast page display for authenticated users
fast searching (maybe views filter is not good for that? but using it to get only friends node, not all nodes, that would regular drupal searching engine give)

I know boost is working only for anonymous and authcache says working for specific roles, and my users are the same role... So what kind of cache shall I use? Sth else? Any suggestions (with some details if possible)? Does drupal also cache forms for auth users to improve submitting node speed (shorten waiting for the form, as it's the same for every user)?

Regards

Comments

Traditional page caching

Posted by dalin on November 29, 2010 at 12:53am

Traditional page caching doesn't appear to be possible here because every user will see different content, and as soon as one person adds/edits content the cache would need to be cleared for all their friends. I've not used Authcache, but I don't think that it would help much here. I think the Block Cache Alter module might be useful. But you basically just need to have good hardware and a well tuned DB server.

Dave Hansen-Lange
Director of Technical Strategy, Advomatic.com
Pronouns: he/him/his

Apache Solr and Search

Posted by shyamala on November 29, 2010 at 2:39am

Searching the node table, with multiple joins if it's CCK would be very expensive if the Database and user-base are large. It would be good idea to move to indexing the content in Apache Solr.

Always we can run pages without caching if they do not have expensive Queries. Our concern are pages where Queries are expensive. Here we need to look at caching solution OR alternate solutions to reduce the load. Like you rightly said the Search page can be a bottle neck.

Solr search can be used as a replacement for core content search and boasts both extra features and better performance.

Checkout http://drupal.org/project/apachesolr,
http://drupal.org/node/343467

Shyamala
Unimity Solutions

Apachesolr Views

Posted by rjbrown99 on December 2, 2010 at 4:51am

+1 for Apache Solr, but I'll suggest one additional module:
http://drupal.org/project/apachesolr_views

It's Views3 integration for Solr so you can build views where the content comes from Solr. It still doesn't solve the 'live' content problem fully as Solr is not a realtime index - generally it indexes on a cron run. You may have to have a bit of custom drush scripting+cron to get it to index new content quickly if your cron runs are, say, every hour or so.