How much traffic can Joomla handle?

[breezeboogie]

I'm deciding between Joomla and Drupal for a website for a college. I like Joomla's ease of use and fast deployment. I like Drupal's granular access and flexibility. Of the open source CMS', these two seem to have the largest user base and support. I'm wanting to know if Joomla can perform well with relatively heavy traffic (approx. 200k visits per month) and a lot of content (approx 700 to 800 pages). Any Joomla sites this size or larger that you can point me too? On a well spec'd dedicated server or managed host, will Joomla handle a site this size well or do I need to look at Drupal or Plone?

Thoughts? Links to reports that discuss this?

[TechiChik]

Hi, I don't have that many pages but one of my sites at www.propertynow.com.au gets thousands of visitors and we don't have a problem.

I think Joomla would handle your requirements just fine, it's your hosting you want to check can handle it. If you're not happy with Joomla's performance then there's a lot of free/paid 3'rd party extensions that can help.

How about www.joomla.org as an example

[breezeboogie]

Thanks for the feedback. Yeah, I think J1.5 is up to task. Just looking for other opinions and documentation I can use to sell this to an organization. Thanks.. Anyone else?

[Geoff]

Moderator Note: Moving to Performance Board

FYI our biggest site in terms of traffic and hits is http://extensions.joomla.org

It does more than 1.5Tb of data transfer per month. Of course we have optimized mysql and run a php cache. Does that site load fast enough for you? If so, maybe your host needs to get up to speed with you on how to optimize your server. On shared hosting though, there is only limited steps that can be taken.

So, it doesn't have to be slow, Joomla is not the only variable that you should be looking at.

http://forum.joomla.org/viewtopic.php?f ... g#p1363118

MTV Networks Quizilla is running Joomla! as well. If you search around, there are some lists floating about with "notable" sites powered by Joomla!.

[TracyDoesPHP]

It's not the traffic that will cause you performance problems with Joomla, but the amount of pages you have, depending on how they're stored. If most of your content consists of news/blog/etc. articles that are accessed from a small numbers of pages, one per category or blog or whatever, you will probably be fine. However, as I've discovered and has been discussed in this forum, in Joomla 1.5 through its current version (1.5.7), there are major performance problems with the menu module if you have a menu that has hundreds of items or that is more than a handful of levels deep. (See these threads: http://forum.joomla.org/viewtopic.php?f=433&t=269421, http://forum.joomla.org/viewtopic.php?f=433&t=330880.) I've found on a site with 400-500 menu items that it takes 5-20 seconds to load a page because of the Joomla menu module. I've had to write a custom menu caching system to deal with it.

I know this distinction might not make much sense to you if you're not familiar with Joomla's content and menu systems. With Joomla, you store articles as content, but the site structure is based on the menu you set up. The menu defines "pages" in Joomla, not the content. If you have a site with 700 articles that each need to be an actual page - a link in your site's navigation/a page whose styling and settings you can control - then Joomla 1.5.7 will be very very slow. If you have 700 articles that fall under 30 pages, it should be fine. An example of this would be a site with some static content pages, like About Us and Contact Us for example, and then maybe a dozen content areas that are groupings of articles, say a News section, a blog about each department, etc. The articles in these sections are accessed by clicking through from the content of each section, but are not distinct menu items that need to be added to the site's navigation. So you might have 700 articles, but only 30 menu items. This setup should be something that Joomla can handle. If you think you might need a setup with 700 actual menu items, do not use Joomla <= 1.5.7.

[sportamok]

Hi,
my site http://www.sportamok.com is hosted on virtual server(vmware) and it has about 10k pages; traffic about 6.5k users/month.
So far so good.


Don't worry Joomla will easilly handle it.

[TracyDoesPHP]

Hi,
my site http://www.sportamok.com is hosted on virtual server(vmware) and it has about 10k pages; traffic about 6.5k users/month.
So far so good.

Yes, your site clearly has a lot of content. But how many menu items do you have? It looks like most of your links are within a component, rather than being their own menu links. I've found that Joomla mainly has problems with large menus, rather than large amounts of articles.

I should note, though, that I believe that in version 1.5.8 there is some sort of fix to the menu performance, and it looks like 1.5.8 will be released soon.

[HERBCYCLOPEDIA]

I always had my doubts, my site gets sometimes a little bit slow, I have actually about 700 pages, 489 of them indexed in Google and the images and text is not so heavy, so I assume it has to do with the hosting plan you get from your web hosting provider.

I've plans to increase the number of pages to roughly 3000, and I hope it still runs well in Joomla 1.5, because migrating it makes me afraid over the consequences.

[justmebg]

My site, knowndonorregistry.com has been having a very hard time with high use. My site has been on 20/20 and a few other news outlets, and even though the server resources are more than adequate it just can't handle spikes.

I'm running it on Joomla 1.7

I am trying to figure out what is causing this, would love any input you have. I don't have too many menu items. Am running JomSocial and K2 for most content. Any thoughts would be appreciated. It's only going to get worse.

[HERBCYCLOPEDIA]

@justmebg: The site is quite lite and loads fast now and I guess having an Alexa ranking above 7 million the pikes may have been very punctual. Anyway if you want to be sure ran a web analyzer (there are plenty of them, I pesonally use websiteanalyzer), and you'll see where the problem is.

Minimize the size of pictures and have a look at the bandwidth assigned by your provider. That's also very important.

[joomlovenow]

all modern cms can handle huge traffic nowadays, but your site performance is more deepeneds on your sever configuration, web-server, caching methods and server configurations.