need help/suggestion for performance in business directory site

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tantan.wijaya's picture
Posted by tantan.wijaya on January 1, 2010 at 1:59pm

Hi all..
i'll develop my website project and i choose to use drupal 6.14.
this website is directory business like and have a large database.
it's have 600.000 for company records and about 9.000.000 for product listing records.
But I have questions and doubts to use drupal, can drupal handle it with a good performance?
And what should i do to make this site have a good performance and fast loading?
For search module will use fuzzy logic,Are any suggestions for that in fast query searching?

FYI : server will use in own server so iam free to costum to install module/extension but for load balancing i dont think so. MySQl still for database server.

Thanks for help

Tantan

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Comments

Drupal itself is able to

Posted by Alexander Langer (not verified) on January 4, 2010 at 2:43am
Alexander Langer's picture

Drupal itself is able to handle almost anything you throw at it. But for a big site / application there's a lot more to consider, mostly talking about average and peak traffic, whether traffic comes from guests (not logged in) or logged in users, etc.

Estimations on those numbers may give you a starting point for load-testing your application with tools such as ab (apache benchmark) or similar tools. Turn Drupal's caches off to get an idea of the load logged in users create. There's various parameters to tune on a single system alone (several apache parameters, several mysql parameters, several php parameters, ...), including the decisions on which foundation to run your Drupal installation (e.g. apache or nginx, using apc, using boost module or not, using memcached or not, using a proxy and if so using squid or varnish, ...) and of course you'll certainly want a plan B in case your load explodes and you have to throw more iron at your app (separating database and webserver at first, load-balancing several webservers, ...).

But again, at first you need to gather more information about how your system (that's the combination of hardware, operating system, services and your custom Drupal installation) scales and behaves under real-world and worst-case conditions. Those information have to be analysed to see where there are bottlenecks and then you'll have something you can base further decisions on.