Cache Performance under Load

Hello Everyone,

I’m considering MODx for a News web site. The owner of the company is concerned about availability under breaking news conditions since many of the content managers he has used have been knocked off line due to the traffic. Has anyone had any experience with MODx, good or bad, under these conditions? I typically turn off cache site-wide to avoid problems with snippets but I plan on having it enabled site-wide.

Thank you.
John

First, please do not cross-post your inquiries in multiple boards here in the forums.

As for your question, this is tough to answer as it depends on too many factors, including ones unique to your deployment and use of MODx; you’ll need to provide a lot more details of what kind of load you are talking about and how the pages you are serving are implemented, but in general, MODx stands up very well to high loads.

Sorry about the cross post but I found that I had posted in the wrong area after submitting and the system wouldn’t let me delete it or move it.

I have no idea what the load might be other than providing examples of other news sites. One example might be the news site NOLA.com during Katrina.

You can probably greatly improve caching performance if you break out all snippet code into external files so that in the actual Manager snippet fields there is only a line to include the external file. You can do the same for all of the resources, from templates to plugins, but snippets tend to take up a lot of the main site cache file.

Not being the webmaster of NOLA.com or knowing the site statistics, that’s kinda hard to say...

Thank you everyone for your feedback. I know it is a hypothetical question with no stats or numbers. I have no experience managing a news site so I don’t know. I’d say 99% of the time the site won’t have enough traffic to matter but there will be that 1% where there would be a breaking news story that everyone wants information and we want to make sure our site can handle it. The hosting company told me the problem will be with the database requests and MODx has cache for handling that. There are other ways of dealing with it such as database clustering and replication but those would be cost prohibitive at this point. I think the best solution would be to proceed and see what happens...having a contingency plan to keep a site up with static pages if the database server cannot keep up.

Thank you all again!

Quote from: cuervo-gold at Feb 07, 2008, 06:02 PM

Thank you everyone for your feedback. I know it is a hypothetical question with no stats or numbers. I have no experience managing a news site so I don’t know. I’d say 99% of the time the site won’t have enough traffic to matter but there will be that 1% where there would be a breaking news story that everyone wants information and we want to make sure our site can handle it. The hosting company told me the problem will be with the database requests and MODx has cache for handling that. There are other ways of dealing with it such as database clustering and replication but those would be cost prohibitive at this point. I think the best solution would be to proceed and see what happens...having a contingency plan to keep a site up with static pages if the database server cannot keep up.

Thank you all again!

Remember, too, that there are lots and lots of news sites with more coming online every day. No matter how good your site it, not *everyone* will be visiting it to see breaking news.

Bob

I manage a site for a client that was part of an international news/sports news story and it runs statically but part of it was running Coppermine and Wordpress along side and the site was getting more than 10000 hits per hour and peaked at 100000 hits per hour before the site was shut down by the host so they could relocate it to a solo setup and once they did that they were easily able to handle the rigorous queries on the Coppermine DB which is not known for its efficiency or speed.

Another option might be to use the Amazon Electroning Computing Cloud with Amazon Simple Storage Solution as it is desiged for redundant efficient usage. You only pay for what you use and ECC can run virtually any stack (so I have read). Apache has built in load balancing and you can also use apache redirect to handle that by setting up mirrors on servers at your host and ensure that the requests are pushed to different servers. So if your host would put your site even on several shared servers for overflow it should be able to handle it. If it gets to hot they may have to shut down or throw up another solo box mirror.

I am not an expert at balancing so I am only throwing out some theoretical possibilities. You may want to consult some people who do server management.

Cheers,

Jay

Are there examples of "larger" MODx installations to gauge the responsiveness for busy sites?

Y.

Another option would be to switch to using the p2p Coral network when under heavy load - apparently it would survive a slashdotting. It’s as simple as appending .nyud.net to your urls.

http://www.coralcdn.org/