Posted by dontmcyn on February 11, 2010 at 3:58am
Hi everyone,
I'm planning to build galleries with the image-as-node approach, but I'm worried about the performance since I do have around 600,000 images and the number is increasing everyday. Here it says:
"It is theoretically possible that, for sites with lots (say hundreds of thousands) of images, storing them all as individual nodes could result in a performance hit from the extra database overhead." (from http://drupal.org/node/325688).
On the other hand, people told me that drupal can handle millions of nodes with the right configuration. Is it because image nodes cause more overhead than normal type of nodes?
Does anyone know any drupal website being able to scale to a lot of images with the image-as-node approach?
Thank you!
Comments
A node is a node is a node.
A node is a node is a node. The performance cost of loading a node is fairly similar regardless of the node type. However cost does increase the more modules that you have that do things when a node is loaded (i.e. CCK adds fields, Fivestar adds a voting widget etc.). Assuming that you'll need to perform queries on that list of 600k images (show me all the images that have this tag etc.) then you'll need to have enough hardware to handle that efficiently. If you use the several-images-in-one-node approach then you are limited to only being able to perform actions with and lists of those image sets, but that means that there's less data to query against meaning more efficient queries. There's always a balance between features, performance, and 1/cost. You can't have more of one without having less of another.
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Dave Hansen-Lange
Director of Technical Strategy, Advomatic.com
Pronouns: he/him/his
I run a site that does
I run a site that does image-as-node. We store image details in imagefield/filefield and push all images to amazon. We had a lot of issues with the site early on, but by setting up a large enough database and memcache server(s) we are now really fast. It's a photo search site. We have approximately 100k images right now.
One thing I really like about image-as-node is the ability to easily add additional cck fields and have them available to several other areas of the site (vbo, solr, node edit).
Similar Question
This was discussed recently here... what I said:
http://groups.drupal.org/node/47018#comment-122826