ModX for 200k visitors/month?

In the past I’ve used MODx to build a 3k unique visitors per month website, and during high-traffic episodes it spiked comfortably to 12k vpm. I found that everything worked very well. I could not imagine using any other CMS, now that I have become friends with snippets, chunks, etc.

However I now have to show that MODx can handle 200k unique visitors per month, 1-2M pageloads, and perhaps 25k user accounts for access-only pages.

So I’ve been looking for benchmarks (found some broken links) and other high-traffic sites, and a post or two in the forum (found some anecdotes). Is there any benchmarking or stress-test work done yet? Or a list of the higher-profile sites? It would put the clients’ minds at ease regarding a MODx approach.

Well the main concern was with using the built-in stats which have disappeared in 0.9.5 and which you should turn off if you face high traffic.

Other than that, the main modxcms.com itself is running MODx and serving more than 1 500 000 pages a month and above 115 000 visitors. I don’t see why your website shouldn’t be fine, provided you have a decent server (given the number, preferrably a dedicated box).

Hopefully other MODx users will testify of their own experience...

Definitely dedicated box, running the latest PHP + MySQL + APC. Honestly, a dual core processor with 2GB of RAM will likely more than hold up to that load. But it really depends on how much of your site is cached vs. dynamic, how many pages, etc. Very hard to generalize really... I’d be most concerned about managing that number of user accounts than anything, though it’d be easy to right a custom management module. The current user admin system really wasn’t designed around managing that number of individuals.