CB scalability

Hi,

I am wondering if CB and its add-ons can be scaled (out) as much as Joomla.

Assuming that I have the right hardware and load balancing in place, how many simultaneous users will CB handle?

Hundreds? Thousands? Tens of thousands? more?

Note that I am talking about simultaneous users... (I understand that in read-only mode, CB scales very well). I am also considering here the case of a fully loaded system with automatic triggers and big add-ons like CB_subs, Groupjive, etc.

Thanks

Jon

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ignatius2 wrote: Hi,

I am wondering if CB and its add-ons can be scaled (out) as much as Joomla.

Assuming that I have the right hardware and load balancing in place, how many simultaneous users will CB handle?

Hundreds? Thousands? Tens of thousands? more?

Note that I am talking about simultaneous users... (I understand that in read-only mode, CB scales very well). I am also considering here the case of a fully loaded system with automatic triggers and big add-ons like CB_subs, Groupjive, etc.

Thanks

Jon

I would say yes - its scales just as good as Joomla.

When you have installed many extensions on your site and have many users, then depending on your specific configurations you might need to fine tune some database tables adding specific indexes for your use case.

Joomlapolis has over 400K users and things are scaling nicely.

Not sure what more to say here.

Thanks Nant,

But the key question is how many concurrent active sessions you can have.

Do you have a approximate idea of what the max session at a given time can be... (And the corresponding hardware requirements in number of cores and Ram)?

You can pm me if you feel that this is confidential info.

Thanks

(I have replied on 27.02.2013 to an exactly same question in our contact form. So if it's you, please check your spam and trash for the detailed reply. Here a detailed copy of it so that it's also publicly available):


Hi Jon,

CB and its CB Team add-ons are very well scalable, and basically similarly scalable as Joomla itself.

I have seen Joomla+CB powered sites with thousands or dozens of thousands users online.

We have done optimizations in order for such active sites to work well.

However, the limiting factor is usually not CB itself, but everything around it: e.g.
- other extensions
- a single small non-optimized third-party module, plugin or component
- the hosting server itself
- the settings of the server and of the webserver, PHP and Mysql database
- the network connection
can ruin your whole server performance

Now speaking of critical high volume sites with more than hundreds or thousands of users online:

Independently of CB, you need to be aware that running such high-traffic sites requires a good hosting engineer at hand or in the team at least at set-up stage.

There are al lots of web-server and database-server fine-tunings to do so that the system itself can sustain such traffic.

You also need to avoid or optimize third-party extensions which are not well designed of course.

Finally, depending on your settings, you might need to add database indexes to optimize database load.

The above is true whatever software you choose on a high-traffic site.

All of that requires to have a skilled engineer at hand or in team.

To start I would recommend to start by avoiding Joomla 1.5, and going with Joomla 3.0 preferably, as you will gain 30%+ performance in Joomla itself. I would also recommend to start with a well-optimized server, with root access for the optimization expert(s) in case they need to monitor or debug performance.

We also have consulting services by the hour in menu Support/services tab to help you if needed (except for third-party items), as we are always interested in high-traffic CB sites. But those available hours are limited, so you will still need your own engineer if you really want to go high in online users. We also have shared hosting services on high-performance high-availability redundant, higly-optimized servers similar to the one hosting this site (Hosting menu at top).

Best Regards,

Thanks a lot,

I will follow all your advice here, starting with your consulting help optimizing the site (Joomla3+CB+CBsubs+GroupJive...).

In order to stretch Joomla+CB even further, would it be possible to synchronize the CB users (incl. approval status) across multiple machines/instances of Joomla+CB to provide something analogous to the shared login across Google apps. (Note that I am not talking about load balancing here, I am talking about sharing users across DIFFERENT sites with different purposes).

- Would this be reasonable?
- If yes, how would you recommend doing this? Rsync, SQL triggers? Extension? (unfortunately Jfusion only works with J!2.5)?
- Would it be possible to share the login status without killing performance?
- or would it be possible to hop between sites without having to log in again?

I am at the planning stage looking for the best tools to do the Job. I like the unparalleled wealth of functionalities that CB offers, and I would like to avoid having to re-invent the wheel just because of scaling issues.

Thanks a lot for your help.

Jon