Scaling up for high volume of users

Could anybody help a newbie with a question of scale?

If we start with 500 users of a CB site and grow to 5,000, 50,000 and then 500,000 users, how would that affect the architecture we use to support the site, and the amount of hardware we have to throw at the site?

jarosz wrote: Could anybody help a newbie with a question of scale?

If we start with 500 users of a CB site and grow to 5,000, 50,000 and then 500,000 users, how would that affect the architecture we use to support the site, and the amount of hardware we have to throw at the site?

CB scales nicely - we have over 470K users here.

When you get to this level you will need to move to a dedicated server.

Hi Nick
Many thanks. So I presume you're on a dedicated server now.
At what volume level did you have to move from shared to dedicated?
Michael

jarosz wrote: Hi Nick
Many thanks. So I presume you're on a dedicated server now.
At what volume level did you have to move from shared to dedicated?
Michael

Yes we are on a dedicated server.

There are many factors that influence this.

It's not only the number of users in your database.

- number of simultaneous users
- other extensions active on the site
- bandwidth loads

There is no clear formula I can give you - bottlenecks can occur at various resources.

Hi Nick

I am wondering if you/we need to scale up further, can Joomla go through the following stages:

a) 1 shared server
b) 1 dedicated server
c) 1 dedicated webserver, 1 dedicated mysql server
d) load balancer - 2 webservers - 1 mysql server
e) load balancer - several virtual/redundant webservers - multiple virtual/redundant mysql servers with automatic failover

Do you know if the basic architecture of Joomla is capable of going beyond stage c?

Cheers

Michael