How many users should a server could handle?

Hello,

how many simultaneously users should a normal Dolphin 7.1 community server be able to handle?

We started our community today, and the server is producing answering times of up to 55sec just for a normal site.

Which experiences do you have with your commuities?

Could a change in the settings - please see the attached Picture - help? 

Thanks for answering

jo

Using the search feature here would be much easier for you...

http://www.boonex.com/googlesearch/search?q=speed+up&gse_filter=googlesearch

This question is not very logical to ask. There are just too many factors that this depends on.

List your server configuration. 

You have already said you are seeing page loads of close to a minute.  How many users are online when you see such slow page loads?

Yesterday, the first day we moved the old system to D7, the page "died" with 5 users online.

Normaly we have between 20 and 30 members online.

@Newton: You are right, but yesterday had been a "black saturday", because the hoster said, that "his server could handle a site like our easily."   And I believed him. A bunch of mails swapped into my Mailbox. "Nice, but too slow." " not possible to work with". 

 @geek_girl: Where can I find the asked Server configuration informations? In dolphin? At the webdesk of our Server? Thanks for answering a stupid newbies questions.

I take it the "old system" was not Dolphin?

If you are on shared hosting, it has to be shared hosting that is configured for only a few users and best set up as a VPS.  You will need to contact your hosting provider for any information on your system.

Most likely your current setup can not handle Dolphin.  There are providers here that can work with you since I feel you do not have the knowledge at this time to set up your own server.

I will not mention any of them; perhaps they will contact you.

Right, the old System wasn't Dolphin.

Right, I am an Musical insrumentmaker. Not an IT-specialist.  

The hoster I found, because he announced as "Special Dolphin Hostingservice"

But thanks

My Hoster says, that the 300MB database is  reason of the problem. Has someone a similar big database?

300mb (or 300,000,000 characters) is pretty big. How many members do you have? Is the db used for something else as well?

If you actually need a 300mb db you're probably going to need a seperate dedicated server for your database.

6.724 users (but not all are online ). Normaly 20 - 30 will be online. At primetimes more.  
243.000 posts in the Forum. (not shown on the statistic, because imported into the database)
Round about 17.000 PM
694 articles
284 quotations (D7 original database had to be changed.)
some pictures, some videos, some soundfiles, some events, some Locations (will grow because new)

1.500.000 - 1.800.000 pageviews / month before Facebook it had been at 3.000.000 pv/month

The database is only for the community
 

That is interesting; how did they import from a non-Dolphin database into a Dolphin database?  Someone may have done something they should not have done.  Do you mind mentioning the "old system"?

videos, sounds, and photos are not stored in the database, they are stored as files outside of the database.  Blog posts, forum posts, etc are stored in the database; but a bit of text from a forum post does not eat that much space.

"The hoster I found, because he announced as "Special Dolphin Hostingservice"".  That may be the case and then it may not be.  People don't mind exaggerating or even right out lying.  If you are on a shared hosting, even VPS shared hosting, then you need to know how many others are using the same box.  My guess is that you need to move to a dedicated server, or a VPS that is not overloaded.  I had a VPS with 2 gig of ram and 1 CPU and it was worthless; all people were doing was trying to sign up.

What complicates matters with you is that you don't know the tech stuff; so you need someone to manage the box for you.

BTW: you need someone to examine your database.  I would really like to know the old system as I am curious as to how they transferred it to Dolphin.  It is possible but you would have needed a mySQL programmer and they would have had to examine all the tables and fields in both database to write a conversion.

The old system was a 2f-cms (written in Germany).

The Transfer of the datas (yes, Pictures and Videos and all this stuff has only links to the users in the database) was made by my son , who wrote programms (php, sql, etc) for the near IT-Higschool located nearby. The Prof. wanted him to stay, but he decided to study machine-building.

And it was a fun to see, that the 2 IT companys said, the transfer wouldn't be possible. And they did it in 1,5 weeks. (Lots of papers on the wall with arrows. "Which field ist connected to the fields in the other database, and how ist the D7 database built, etc...) So there is "not nothing" here, but server-adminstration and care on the system should be done by professionals, who could act quickly if something is out of order.

 My son needs the time to study. ;-) And he does not have time to do things like this all the time, because he is working (with friends) on their own Startup with 360° photo-machines for webshops. We have the prototype installed at the photostudio of www.blockfloetenshop.de. And it works fine. 

By the way: He also made the programming of our Internet-Radio: www.recorder-radio.com

Tomorrow the hoster will move the community to a dedicated Server. I hope this will help. He wrote: 2GB RAM Minimum and 4GB RAM possible and only we are on the "box".

Not enough RAM, I'd suggest at least 8gb for a busy dolphin site with a large db especially if you intend rapid growth.

And the number of CPU cores?

 Is meaningless without knowing what the processor is, and the OS.

 This is my tool for loading a customers server for load test. 

ATTENTION, using this on your production server could/will take your server to max loads, like 50-60 timing out your main sites.. with that said, it's a great tool to really see how your server performs.

https://www.blitz.io/

No, what I meant was that he should have also been told how many CPU cores he will be getting as that does figure into things.  A one CPU core server is not the same as a four core CPU server.  With his site, I would say at least a four core server.

 Oh, right, yeah, I'd go centos x64 and quad Xeon with a view to a lesser box for the db alone in the near future.

Thing is, that's a lot of content for 6k users, cost must be a factor.

I still think 300mb seems big.

300mb does seem rather large for only 6k members.  Mines only ~270mb for 45k+

I am still curious about the import of a database from a completely different platform into Dolphin.  I have a feeling that is why the database is so huge.

Hi,

thanks for all the help and ideas. The old database had a similar size. So I do not think, that there is a mistake. Because a lot of them are very busy.

But a very good Information, that 2GB are not enough.

Thanks to all of you !!!!

yeah seems like a complicated task for them to do willy nilly... I'd be curious if there were any non-dolphin tables in there... and what their sizes were.

 You have the ADS module enable? if yes. try disable it.

That happen to me recently and i see the apache take down my server just doing a post in the ADS module. is was consuming the all memory of the server just for 1 post in the ADS.  i uninstall the module and installa again and the problem was resolved.  I lost my data but resolved my "mystery issue"

Sounds like you may be using shared hosting.  I suggest you switch to good VPS package with as many CPU cores (at least 4) and as much memory (at least 4GB) as you can afford at this time.  With the VPS you will be able to setup "accelerator" software to cache the database contents in memory (I assume the larger the database the more memory you'll need).

I just upgraded to a cloud server with 4096MB RAM, 3.6GHz 4vCPU, 80GB Cloud Storage, 3000GB Bandwidth because my  VPS with 1.2Ghz cpu, 100GB storage, 1500Gb Bandwidth and 1024MB was unusable as a production site because of the slow load times.

I did see noticeable performance gains regarding page loads but still, it seemed very slow.  Then I turned off the anti-spam tools and now it loads fine.  I guess those take up a ton of cpu cycles.

I have IP logging on but I have a feeling that may be taking up a lot of cpu time too. 

I suggest testing with those off and see what impact it has on load times.

 What about a cache system, eAccelerator works very good!

looks as eAccelerator will be taken out of dolphin in 7.1.2...

Is there a way to test my server to see how many users it can handle other than paying for that monthly subscription?  I'm on a VPS with a 2.2 Ghz CPU with four cores, 1536MB of dedicated RAM and 256MB burst RAM.  Sometimes my site will take a half second to load photos but I am not sure if it is my connection, my server, or just dolphin.