Can Coppermine handle a Large Growing Website?

[groonie]

EDIT: Current traffic and new server specs have been updated in my recent post in this thread.




Hello,I work for a website that generates 10 million hits a day(84,000 unique visitors) and growing each week. Photos are a major part of our site. Each thursday we post photos from the event on wednesday night and get a huge surge of traffic.

my question is...can Coppermine handle this amount of traffic? or should i look elsewhere?


thanks for any help, btw,im planning on using coppermine on other smaller sites asap. looks great.

[Joachim Müller]

I'm not sure, but only because nobody running a coppermine gallery with high load has so far voiced this. I know there are big installs (considering the number of members and pics in the database).
The student union homepage of Taiwan's Chiao Tung University (the site oasis runs) has got incredible 201,565 pics in their database (full stats: 6517 users, 201565 pictures in 9929 albums with 8095 comments). It's the largest install I know of, although things seem to have changed, as Oasis term on the student union has run out, there's a new layout and a new url (http://www.pixnet.net/), with the stats removed and everything in chinese it's hard for me to tell if it's still based on this large gallery or if they have started from scratch.
I can't see any reason why coppermine should not be capable of running on a site with heavy load.

GauGau

[Tarique Sani]

We would also be interested in taking a look at a real live Coppermine site taking that kind of traffic - do take a look a the optimization hints that have been posted on the forums and apply them.

[groonie]

thanks for the info. I may give it a shot in a week or so. I could do a "special" gallery just to as a test run and see how it goes. Ill let everyone know. Having this CPG would make my job ALOT easier!

[Oasis]

Hi groonie! Coppermine should have no problems coping with high traffic, and it is in fact very fast if you do not have too many pictures in the database. Coppermine's performance is not determined as much by the traffic load than by the database size. Performance problems will only arise when you start to amass a huge amount of pictures and albums in your database (well over many tens of thousands), in which case, you will have to start removing unnecessary queries, keeping it as simple as possible. But in the case of your gallery, it seems you are going to use this as a showcase gallery, so I'm assuming users aren't going to be allowed to upload photos, so this shouldn't be a problem. I'm sure Coppermine will be able to satisfy your needs. I would recommend changing the coppermine database connection from connect to pconnect.

@gaugau: Yes, Pixnet is still based on the original Student Union gallery. At the time of writing, there are already "31,358 Users with 939,352 Pics in 54,276 Albums" on the site! You can see the live stats in my signature. We wanted to retain control of the gallery, so we had its ownership transfered to an independent team before we left and we gave the gallery a complete rehaul in both layout and functions, removing all references to the Student Union. We also teamed up with Taiwan's largest BBS portal, and for a brief period started to offer 400MB accounts, causing our users to surge. So things have been getting rather exciting over here, and contrary to my belief that I would have had more time off, I am now more busy than ever with Pixnet. And by the way, you're gonna be seeing quite a surge of Chinese coppermine users  .

[groonie]

ah,thanks for that info Oasis!

I had to put this project on hold in order to try and get us over to a better hosting company with a full blown linux setup and a seperate sql server asap. When and if that happens we are going to focus on a Open Source CMS system with CPG. May be awhile,but i will definately keep everyone updated. In the meantime im going to install this for a way to archive my photos for the marketing dept only. much easier then snail mailing cd's every week...

thanks again,this community is wonderful!

[groonie]

well, the wait is finally over and the new site with CPG is on the fastrack.
Anyone have suggestions or advice based on our current traffic and new servers?. thanks alot.

The site will be strictly for showcase and we will add 60 pics per week on average. The photo area is the most popularpart of our website. If you would like to look at the current site with our current static photo gallery,let me know.

Specs below.

We will have 1 dual xeon for serving the webpages,and the other dual xeon for mySQL.

Current Site Traffic
400k unique visits per month +
Average 306,013 page views daily
Average 1.3 Terabyte bandwidth per month and rising.

New Server Combo

One of each of the following:
Dual Intel Xeon 2.4 Ghz processors
1 GB Registered ECC PC2100 266Mhz DDR RAM
3 X 36GB 10,000RPM Ultra320 SCSI drives with 8MB cache
(2 Drives configured with RAID 1 and 1 drive mounted backup)
ASR-2010S SCSI Hardware RAID Card (RAID Level 1)
SuperMicro motherboard, expandable to 12 GB RAM
SuperMicro Server-Class case
533 Mhz Front-Side Bus (FSB)
FreeBSD
cPanel/WHM
1000 GB Data Transfer per server/'per Month

[itang]

I just wondering what is the hardware configuration the pixnet.net using for such hugh amount of photos and mySQL database. Oasis, would you like to give me a hint?

[Joachim Müller]

Oasis has retired, he doesn't visit this board regularly.