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How does Vanilla scale?

edited November 2011 in Vanilla 2.0 - 2.8
Hello vanilla community,
we're currently evaluating vanilla for a roughly 7k members community (somewhat tired of vbulletin). Questions regarding performance/scaling came up.

-How big is the biggest community vanillaforums.com hosts?
-Is that a special version of vanilla forums or can it be done with the stock downloadable version too?
-Would you recommend vanilla for a 7k-8k members community? Roughly causing 70-100GB/month traffic.

Thanks for any help

Rgds

Best Answer

  • TimTim Operations Vanilla Staff
    edited November 2011 Answer ✓
    Hello vanilla community,
    we're currently evaluating vanilla for a roughly 7k members community (somewhat tired of vbulletin). Questions regarding performance/scaling came up.

    -How big is the biggest community vanillaforums.com hosts?
    -Is that a special version of vanilla forums or can it be done with the stock downloadable version too?
    -Would you recommend vanilla for a 7k-8k members community? Roughly causing 70-100GB/month traffic.

    Thanks for any help

    Rgds
    Hi there.

    The short answer is that Vanilla scales very well.

    The longer answer is far more complicated.

    Vanilla's main advantage in the scaling arena is that it is designed to take full advantage of a multi-server environment. We currently host a forum that receives on the order of 12 million hits per month, transferring about 1.6 Tb of data in the same time. The forum itself loads in under 1 second on every page and sustains between 1,000 and 2,000 *concurrent* connections at any given time (fluctuating by time of day, obviously). There are approximately 100,000 members and 20 million comments.

    Obviously such a site is not running off one server. In actual fact the setup is quite advanced:

    8 servers in total, all running linux:

    2 loadbalancers (1 active, 1 waiting to hot failover in case of a problem) using IPIP and pulse
    4 webservers running nginx, each with 1Gb of ram
    1 database server running Percona MySQL, with 8 Gb of ram (also running Sphinx search indexer)
    1 content/cache server running nginx and memcached, with 1Gb of ram

    We are able to scale such a cluster in 3 primary ways:

    1) Additional webservers - This is done if the volume of traffic increases to the point where nginx is unable to satisfy requests in under a second and is having to delay responding until PHP gateways free up.

    2) Additional cache servers - This is rare, but would happen if we increased the amount of cached data stored per user, per thread, etc and needed more ram (or to distribute cache hits to different systems due to network bottlenecks)

    3) Database splitting or replication - This is a last resort and more complex than the previous two options, but still possible.

    As you can see, Vanilla itself is able to handle a high volume of requests, but the technology stack required can be daunting. Considering that, we offer just such a stack as a hosted, Infrastructure As A Service offering through VanillaForums.com. We take care of hosting, maintenance, software updates, security, and backups.

    I hope I've answered your questions to a satisfactory degree.

    If you need any more information about how best to scale Vanilla, or about our vanillaforums.com hosting plans, don't hesitate to contact me!

    Tim

    Vanilla Forums COO [GitHub, Twitter, About.me]

Answers

  • 422422 Developer MVP
    Wufoo uses vanilla

    There was an error rendering this rich post.

  • Thanks.

    I know this is a somewhat generic question thats probably hard to answer. I'm speaking just ballparks. So any help is greatly appreciated.
  • while you are still waiting for you answer here is my 2p

    Generally the query's aren't bad, although I would not have a global activities, it is mostly mindless gibberish anyway, and it can slow things down. The user notifications and activities you might want to keep, depending.

    I understand that some run on nginx with micro-caching

    Vanilla main plus is it adaptability, but it might be more rough around the edges than you are used to. It suits developers, first and admins second.

    grep is your friend.

  • TimTim Operations Vanilla Staff
    edited November 2011 Answer ✓
    Hello vanilla community,
    we're currently evaluating vanilla for a roughly 7k members community (somewhat tired of vbulletin). Questions regarding performance/scaling came up.

    -How big is the biggest community vanillaforums.com hosts?
    -Is that a special version of vanilla forums or can it be done with the stock downloadable version too?
    -Would you recommend vanilla for a 7k-8k members community? Roughly causing 70-100GB/month traffic.

    Thanks for any help

    Rgds
    Hi there.

    The short answer is that Vanilla scales very well.

    The longer answer is far more complicated.

    Vanilla's main advantage in the scaling arena is that it is designed to take full advantage of a multi-server environment. We currently host a forum that receives on the order of 12 million hits per month, transferring about 1.6 Tb of data in the same time. The forum itself loads in under 1 second on every page and sustains between 1,000 and 2,000 *concurrent* connections at any given time (fluctuating by time of day, obviously). There are approximately 100,000 members and 20 million comments.

    Obviously such a site is not running off one server. In actual fact the setup is quite advanced:

    8 servers in total, all running linux:

    2 loadbalancers (1 active, 1 waiting to hot failover in case of a problem) using IPIP and pulse
    4 webservers running nginx, each with 1Gb of ram
    1 database server running Percona MySQL, with 8 Gb of ram (also running Sphinx search indexer)
    1 content/cache server running nginx and memcached, with 1Gb of ram

    We are able to scale such a cluster in 3 primary ways:

    1) Additional webservers - This is done if the volume of traffic increases to the point where nginx is unable to satisfy requests in under a second and is having to delay responding until PHP gateways free up.

    2) Additional cache servers - This is rare, but would happen if we increased the amount of cached data stored per user, per thread, etc and needed more ram (or to distribute cache hits to different systems due to network bottlenecks)

    3) Database splitting or replication - This is a last resort and more complex than the previous two options, but still possible.

    As you can see, Vanilla itself is able to handle a high volume of requests, but the technology stack required can be daunting. Considering that, we offer just such a stack as a hosted, Infrastructure As A Service offering through VanillaForums.com. We take care of hosting, maintenance, software updates, security, and backups.

    I hope I've answered your questions to a satisfactory degree.

    If you need any more information about how best to scale Vanilla, or about our vanillaforums.com hosting plans, don't hesitate to contact me!

    Tim

    Vanilla Forums COO [GitHub, Twitter, About.me]

  • edited November 2011

    Tim,
    thanks for your reply. This was exactly the kind of information I was looking for.
  • Thanks for the informative post, Tim. I'm also evaluating Vanilla, but my community is more like the size of the client you are describing (100k members, 500k logins/month, 200k posts/month).

    I'm curious about why it makes sense to run so many servers, instead of giving more resources to the ones you already have?
  • jspautschjspautsch Themester ✭✭✭
    Bookmarked! Some very useful information here, thanks guys.
  • x00x00 MVP
    edited November 2011
    Some good info here. There is, I'm sure unintentional, the implication that that nosql isn't about using replication. Of course nosql is all about replication. I'm sure you were referring specifically to relational db clusters.

    grep is your friend.

  • TimTim Operations Vanilla Staff
    We were referring to MySQL replication being a pain, and NoSQL being less needy resource wise therefore prolonging the time during which replication is not required.

    Vanilla Forums COO [GitHub, Twitter, About.me]

  • ToddTodd Chief Product Officer Vanilla Staff
    Yeah, most nosql solutions are great with replication thank goodness. It's great to see these solutions out there and I'd love to work with them some day. NoSQL requires a pretty big mindset change in a lot of cases though.
  • x00x00 MVP
    edited November 2011
    Sure it does. I remember mark considering ORM, but in the the went with the code igniter solution which was more light weight. Nowadays, with noSQL they try to make migration minimal or non issue.

    Honestly the mindset, except in transactional, is as it probably more how it should be in sql solutions but isn't, in other words much of data integrity is should be handled at the script/framework level, moving way from the old normalised way of doing it. A good example is how you zip the categories to the discussions.

    grep is your friend.

  • Also many noSQL solutions don't have integrity single server, they are dependant on replication.

    grep is your friend.

  • @todd: have you tried mysql-proxy yet? it is useful when there are plenty same query send to mysql

  • ToddTodd Chief Product Officer Vanilla Staff

    I haven't tried mysql-proxy yet no. We actually don't have scalability problems on the database side right now though. I think that caching is almost always superior to replication.

    We do want to get more into replication for availability though. Do you recommend mysel-proxy?

    Man, why is mysql replication such a pain?

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