Quote from: alfredm at Dec 27, 2006, 12:52 PM
I just discovered MODx and this system looks like a perfect fit for a project that I’m working on, but I haven’t been able to find much information about how this CMS scales and handles large amounts of traffic.
Some of my questions are:
1) What experiences do people have using MODx in high load environments? What are it’s limitations?
Depending on the physical environment, size, and nature of your site definition (i.e. caching configuration, etc.), MODx can currently perform very well under high loads. It can generally serve between 2 and 15 pages per second in average environments (I’m serving close to 30 on a very powerful dedicated box). But again, it really depends on what specific pages in your site do dynamically, versus serving cached or partially cached pages.
Honestly, the only issues you should run into is if your web server can’t handle the traffic. MODx is fairly scalable in it’s current state. However, current scalability issues do arise with the size of the site definition however. The site cache files get a bit bloated when working with sites containing 5000 or more unique pages, and this can affect performance considerably. The next release will offer some relief options for this issue.
Quote from: alfredm at Dec 27, 2006, 12:52 PM
2) Has anyone implemented a MODx installation on multiple, load balanced servers?
I have deployed it on shared grid systems like mediatemple’s new GS service, as well as traditional shared cluster environments, but there is nothing in the current MODx to really help you take advantage of true load-balancing. However, significant efforts have been made over the last year to specifically be able to take advantage of advanced load-balancing and caching techniques. Specifically, database-managed sessions, as well as result set and object caching which can take advantage of memcached are being developed and tested as part of these efforts. This should help increase scalability by tremendously reducing the load on the database server, allowing clusters of cheap hardware with lots of RAM to take care of the dirty work. This is how Slashdot and many of the higher-volume PHP-based sites handle it, and one of the key goals as we try to take MODx to the next level.
Quote from: alfredm at Dec 27, 2006, 12:52 PM
3) Does anyone have examples of any of the above sites?
The MODx site itself is the best example we have, though any scalability problems we’ve encountered so far have all been associated with our forum software. We certainly don’t know of anything running MODx with traffic comparable to Digg or Slashdot, but again, we certainly want to be able to claim such in the future, and would be very interested in working with others that have similar goals to achieve this.
Quote from: alfredm at Dec 27, 2006, 12:52 PM
4) How robust is the security for MODx?
We take security very seriously with MODx. Because the developers and maintainers of MODx depend on the security of MODx in their customer projects, any vulnerabilities which are reported are dealt with swiftly. Of course, MODx can only be as secure as your environment is, but in general, you will not find cross-site scripting, SQL injection, and other application-specific vulnerabilities in MODx. And if you do, they won’t be exploitable for long...
MODX Staff