Production Druapl on Windows: Recommended

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sromine's picture
Posted by sromine on August 23, 2011 at 5:46pm

Hello,

I work for a foundation and we are about to utilize Drupal with the CiviCRM module. I am familiar with installing Drupal on linux, but my current work environment is only optimal for MS windows.

Having never had any experience with installing and running a windows based drupal system I just want to get some opinions how stable it is? Will I have problems installing modules or anything? Any problems at all about stability?

We have physical servers running Windows 2008 R2 Hyper V with Windows based backup software. If I received feedback that a Drupal Windows install is just as stable as a linux install, then this would be better for my environment from a server/backup software standpoint (already existing and in place). If some felt that this was not as stable as a linux environment (less about the war between linux and windows users, linux is a more stable platform over time in my opinion, and more about Drupals stability on windows) I might move in the direction of getting a linux specific server setup.

Thanks for any input you can provide.

Comments

No Issues Here

Posted by Akaoni on August 23, 2011 at 11:08pm
Akaoni's picture

We run Drupal 7 on Win 2008 R2 with no issues:
http://www.awm.gov.au/

3 load balanced VM servers, 4,700+ static nodes, 1,000,000+ dynamic pages, 10,000+ visitors per day, 80,000+ pageviews per day, and stability is fine.
Whole site is Drupal (except the Blog which is still Wordpress) - ignore the old .asp URLs, we just didn't want to change any URLs until we had a proper policy in place. ;)

Only weird things I can remember running into are some permissions oddities and WinCache seems to lock up some files, making filesystem deletes (such as Module Upgrades) a bit hit and miss.
We needed to do some heavy performance tuning but I'd suspect the same would go for a LAMP install of this size.

Obviously there's a little less community support for Win Drupal installs, but that's improving.

Help on New Site

Posted by memmons on May 1, 2012 at 4:46pm
memmons's picture

I remember seeing this before, it is an impressive site. We are going to go live with out site in a couple of weeks and was wondering what performance tuning or modules you used for this site? We plan to use various caching modules along with Akamai for page and static file caching for anonymous users. I do not want to over complicate it though for obvious reasons.

*Just an FYI, it is not recommended to update your modules through the UI per Lullabot training team.

Thanks

Posted by Akaoni on May 20, 2012 at 1:39am
Akaoni's picture

Thanks, memmons.

I no longer work for the Australian War Memorial, but from what I can remember:

  • Minimised number of enabled modules - more modules meant more performance impact.
  • Testing and tuning of PHP, FastCGI, and WinCache for optimum speed based on the site's web environment.
  • All cache tables and sessions (custom session handler) stored in MongoDB.
  • Menu cache was disabled as the main menu is several thousand items and the cache was getting so big it crashed MongoDB (8Gb+). Performance testing showed no performance loss without this cache.
  • Page caching with some PHP sessions. This was a custom module that allowed cached pages when the user had a PHP session but only if the session contents met certain criteria. This meant session data from integrated 3rd party apps didn't negate Drupal caching, eg. WordPress and the non-Drupal ecommerce system.

Yes wincache 1.1 creates file locking and ownership problems

Posted by johnbarclay on December 23, 2011 at 5:20pm
johnbarclay's picture

See http://groups.drupal.org/node/25535#comment-654488

www.johnbarclay.com

Drupal on Windows

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