2

I tested Liferay on two different machines: One vserver with 1GB of RAM and the another with 3 GB of RAM. On the one with 1GB Liferay was very slow. On the second (3GB of RAM) it runs quite good.

My testing environments has just one organization/community and only one user (me). Imagine the situation I would build a portal for approx. 15 organizations and 400 users (30 users per organization) in total. Would a server with 3GB of RAM be enough to run quite fast?

This is very important question for me because of the financial aspect. I don't want to spend 200 Dollars per month for hosting. :-)

Thx.

Vivid
  • 399
  • 1
  • 8
  • 19

1 Answers1

2

It's more dependent on the number of concurrent users than on the number of users on the system. IMHO Liferay runs slow on your 1GB server because most likely you didn't tune and run with the default memory settings - this will most likely cause swapping to step in, thus your suffering in performance.

Tipp: Download the performance whitepaper, read and understand the scenarios in there. Also, you can easily do the initial (rule of thumb) measurements on a local computer and see how much memory the JVM has to have in order to run smoothly. Especially in tight memory situations, you definitely want to fine tune your VM settings to match your hardware.

You'll find rough numbers and orders of magnitude in the performance whitepaper. See what best matches your usecases.

Remember that the same argument counts for your database and other components that you happen to have. With what I assume your sizing requirements to be (from the few details that you give) you should get Liferay to run on a server for well below 200$/month

Olaf Kock
  • 46,930
  • 8
  • 59
  • 90
  • I checked the performance whitepaper. But it is very sobering to read of a szenario with 3 different servers (all of them have between 4 and 16 GB memory). :-( – Vivid Jun 07 '12 at 11:15
  • Don't read the whitepaper for the actual hardware used: Read it for the scenarios mentioned in there. You'll easily see that the order of magnitude is by far bigger than the numbers you gave. Identify the numbers of *concurrent* users that you need (not user accounts, but actual users that access the system at the same time - virtual users in the performance whitepaper). – Olaf Kock Jun 07 '12 at 11:32
  • 1
    "A portal" is neither more nor less performant than "a programming language". What do you need: Development performance? Runtime performance? Minimized hosting cost? Maximum OOTB functionality? Maximum flexibility? Maximum familiarity with the environment? Minimum learning curve? (add your favourite criterium, order by importance, rate and choose) – Olaf Kock Jun 07 '12 at 11:35
  • 1.) Runtime performance 2.) Development performance 3.) Minimized hosting cost... I have just 6 month to build a subset of this portal. :-) And actually is see this problem: [link](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10930437/can-liferay-publish-to-a-another-server) – Vivid Jun 07 '12 at 11:44