Does s9y work well with over 40k visitors a day?

ninja · Post by **ninja** » Wed Mar 22, 2006 3:31 am

Hello

I used wordpress for a while, but my blog seems to have problems with over 40k users a day. I wonder how s9y handels so many visitors?

carl_galloway · Post by **carl_galloway** » Wed Mar 22, 2006 3:47 am

ninja, there have been a couple of discussions about this very point and Garvin has recommended taking a good look at your hardware if performance is an issue. Read this thread and this thread

BTW, are you talking about unique visits or hits, my own blog has successfully handled 23000 hits in a single day (I think that equated to 1900 unique visitors) and I don't think any users had problems with performance.

Hope that helps, but I'd be very interested in hearing more about your blog.

Cheers

Carl

ninja · Post by **ninja** » Wed Mar 22, 2006 3:49 am

hello, i won't post the link of the blog here since it's a 'erotic' blog but it has about 40k uniques and still growing.

carl_galloway · Post by **carl_galloway** » Wed Mar 22, 2006 4:06 am

Very impressive, and there are a couple of other adult oriented webmasters using Serendipity whose blogs are also graphic intense and might be a better case study for you. Hopefully one of them will make a comment about how much traffic they get.

Actually thinking about it, supersized.org might have traffic hitting those sorts of numbers, so maybe we need Jannis to make a comment, otherwise we'll just have to wait for other users to come online - sorry I couldn't do more.

carl_galloway · Post by **carl_galloway** » Wed Mar 22, 2006 4:11 am

Very impressive, and there are a couple of other adult oriented webmasters using Serendipity whose blogs are also graphic intense and might be a better case study for you. Hopefully one of them will make a comment about how much traffic they get.

Actually thinking about it, supersized.org might have traffic hitting those sorts of numbers, so maybe we need Jannis to make a comment, otherwise we'll just have to wait for other users to come online - sorry I couldn't do more.

ninja · Post by **ninja** » Wed Mar 22, 2006 2:19 pm

hello, thanks for the answer

Normally I would just install the blog software and test it myself, but since i have a lot of posts and stuff it would take a lot of time, so I would like to know it before i move to a new blog software

Post by **garvinhicking** » Wed Mar 22, 2006 2:30 pm

Hi!

What hardware and software do you have on your webserver? What is its load average, how much RAM does the machine allocate? Do you have any PHP accelerators?

Answering "does s9y handle 40k visitors" is like answering "does your car drive fast?"

Yes, serendipity can handle 40k visitors, given that the machine it is running on can handle 40k visitors.

If you run down 40k visitors to estimated 15 requests per second you definitely need some good CPU power. The server where s9y.org runs on also poweres supersized.org, where the Opteron 3000 CPU can run about 20 requests/second. But the server also uses lighthttpd and APC. MY server for example stalls at about 6 requests per second on larger PHP applications.

It's all about relativity, like Einstein says.

There are severel performance tuning options available to make it work. it also depends a lot on how many dynamic options you want to have on the blog and what kind of plugins you plan to utilize.

Apart from that, what other blog systems could handle, Serendipity can handle as well. If Serendipity cannot handle your 40k visitors, chances are that other blog applications will likely also not be able to handle 40k visitors on your hardware.

That means, if you tuned WordPress with its caching plugins and it did not run smoothly on your host, it means Serendipity will also not run smoothly on your blog. Regarding performance, the two systems are somewhat alike. On some setups s9y is faster than WP, on other systems (Depending on the plugins) WP is faster than s9y. But they are not that far apart in either direction.

So the bottom line would be not only to choose another application, but to tune your webserver or buy new hardware.

Regards,
Garvin

ninja · Post by **ninja** » Wed Apr 05, 2006 2:54 am

Hello again

after searching for and trying tons of other blog scripts I still like serendipity most. I like movable type because a lot of people I know told me it's extremely fast (not the admin, the sites for the surfers) for high traffic sites (without any plugins) but I can't believe that such talented coders like you (serendipity team) don't have solutions for high traffic sites in mind for the future.

What about the 'Simple Cached/Pregenerated Pages' plugin, will this be the solution for me now? I just wonder because nobody recommended it to me in this thread...

Thanks for reading

Post by **jhermanns** » Wed Apr 05, 2006 10:29 am

hey ninja,

how many pageviews (not uniques) per day are we talking? what's your hardware and which server software do you use? apache with php as dso or maybe php as fastcgi?

cheers,
jannis.

Post by **garvinhicking** » Wed Apr 05, 2006 11:27 am

Ninja: That plugin was recommended in the two threads given by Carl Galloway.

Yes, it will help you, if your hardware is too slow for dynamic sites. Using that plugin, just like when using MT, will get rid of many dynamic functions and requires full page rebuilds when someone submits a comment. So it is not the ultimate solution.

"Dynamic, Flexible, Fast -- pick any two."

Best regards,
Garvin