Will unmodified Dolphin 7.0.3 handle 4000 members?

I wonder if the new Dolphin unmodified would handle 4000 members?  I have a dedicated server xeon with 4 cores and 4 mb ram.

I will only use the "Dream" mode of Modzzz and video comments, groups, videos, photos and blogs..

Would I need any server optimization and/or website optimization for 4000 members? I know this was impossible with the earlier dolphin release but is this 7.0.3 really faster?

Hello, yes dolphin 7.0.3 have improved cache systems and myqsl queries optimization. But you will need prepare you web server too, you can read about it here : http://www.boonex.com/unity/blog/entry/500_Speed_Improvement_of_Dolphin_

Hi there,

very interesting issue!

We still use 7.0.2 because we just now finished a 7 months (!!!) fight in order to make our site stable and not crashing or stalling/stopping at peak time.

We have 2.000 active members (around 10.000 in total), 20 to 25 new members everyday, around 800 single visitors per day; at peak time we have from 45 to 65 users online and it was a disaster to have the site working.  Our site basically uses the photos and profiles search, blogs and foruns are not that busy, but IM is highly used and SPY is highly appreciated.

We had to move hosting company, we still have a dedicated server, but now we have a XEON, with 250 GB mem + 2 drives of 120 GB each + 8 RAM...and we had to had it fine tunned!

To make the site stable and working fine, we had the help of our agent, AntonLV and of Dolphinbugfix, and if it was not for these guys, we would probably have closed the site or lost our users (which would mean the same). They did a wonderful job, were always available to help us, at any time. Dolphinbugfix did the server preparation, upgraded scripts, changed all they needed and it finally worked.

We had no idea that a community site, which is supposed to have a lot of members, would use and hog so many server resources. We could not find many help here in the forums, it seemed we were the only ones with that problem.  And now that we have finished, we are not ready to upgrade to 7.0.3 and start the fight again!!

It would really help to see here in this post any similar problems that sites with more that 2.000 members may have.

Regards,

Hello again! I created this thread a month ago at that time it was 4000 members, now I need a site that can handle 8000 members.. I am currently using a hosted blog like wordpress.. Each time I post something new I do get about 1000 visitors at the same time in my blog..  Can dolphin handle 1000 visits at the same time? I just want to use the movies, forums and some few things.. ? Since I have so fast growth at my website I am afraid of starting a dolphin site incase it will not handle it

So the maximum amount of users you had at the same time active is 65 and it was a problem? Do you think it can handle 1000users at athe same time?

Most performance issues are a result of a lot of logged in users as the member bar, notifications, and chat systems (if used) cause a lot of requests to the server.

Try using FireFox and FireBug to monitor the network requests and responses. You will see how extra 'chatty' the site is when logged in.

So basically,  you can have 50,000 members in the database and if only a few users are online there should not be any issues. Searches may be a bit slow, really large friends lists make take an extra second to load, but over all the site should be responsive.

On one of my servers Apache and PHP use about 30MB per instance / thread. A instance can process one request a time.  Lets assume each user request takes .5 seconds to process so a single instance can take care of two requests a second.

Next lets assume a logged in member averages one request every two seconds.

Therefor a single apache instance should be able to handle four online  users. And each online user requires about 7.5MB of RAM.  (30 / 4 = 7.5)

Assuming the CPU and Hard Disks can keep up, if you have 1000 users online you would need 7.5GB (7500MB) of RAM,  just for apache. In addition, the MySQL server would need enough CPU and RAM to handle at least 500 request per second (This assumes each apache request  results in two database request (a low estimate) )

Unless you have a very large server with lots of CPU cores, RAM and fast disks you will most likely need a second server for the database.

The good / bad news is apache uses a lot more RAM and CPU then Nginx.  So it is possible to use less resources per online user...

Also, please keep in mind that a custom configure apache server can take care or most requests much faster then .5 seconds.  Using a PHP op-cache makes a huge difference as well as uninstalling apache modules that are not needed. With the correct changes it should be possible to get the average request  under .25 seconds thus doubling the number of possible online members, or halving the resources for 1000 online members. (assuming the database server can keep up, apache has to wait for the database to return request information, so the longer it takes the database to return the results, the longer apache takes to service the request.)

I would look into Litespeed or Nginx.

I am currently using Litespeed and it is definitely much faster than Apache.

My site is usually super fast until it goes beyond 80 - 90 online members.

This is usually when I notice it slowing down...but still chugging along.

I really hope that 7.0.4 will make a difference.  Otherwise I will consider adding more ads

throughout my site to encourage users to leave (and make me some extra money).