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I absolutely love Joomla, it's a great CMS but can it scale, let's say to the extent of having enormous traffic and users like facebook if I have the right servers and set up my MYSQL database right?

Is there a limit to Joomla itself or does its scalability depend on servers and proper database manipulation?

Let's say I create a membership joomla website that gets very busy and grows big like twitter or facebook , would it be able to scale if I have enough servers?

wattostudios
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user1787184
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    nginx, load balanced, memcached with a varnish front end running a mysql cluster (atleast 7.2 with AQL). Sure you can. – wesside Oct 31 '12 at 00:58
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    "Let's say I create a membership joomla website that gets very busy and grows big like twitter or facebook , would it be able to scale if I have enough servers?" Lets say I earn a billion dollars tomorrow, while we're at it. Sites don't grow to the size of Twitter and Facebook without huge changes in what runs them behind the scenes. Even if you started with Joomla, it wouldn't be anything unrecognizable as such by the end. – ceejayoz Oct 31 '12 at 01:26

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Probably not. No CMS in common use is easy to scale that far. To do it you'll need to make compromises on functionality or speed and you'll need to get either creative about avoiding database access altogether or creative about wiring your site up to a more scalable data store.

In general it will require an entire team of systems engineers to scale any non-static website to that degree, and using a heavy PHP framework that relies on MySQL by default will likely make that somewhat more difficult.

Andrew Gorcester
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  • I don't think that makes sense because JOOMLA is PHP and MYSQL application , it is not really different from a usual website running with php and mysql except that it provides you for an interface to manager your content quicker .. thanks for the input though , I am waiting for more replies – user1787184 Oct 31 '12 at 00:58
  • www.mashable.com is huge and runs on wordpress – user1787184 Oct 31 '12 at 00:59
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    Well, in part it depends on your definitions of "can" and "easy" and in part it depends on what functionality you need. Huge Wordpress sites go way, way out of their way to avoid actually using Wordpress functionality that hits the database for anything. They never use Wordpress login or Wordpress comments and they cache to the point that Wordpress is just the backend to a mostly static site. I assumed by "membership website", by comparing to Facebook and Twitter, and by using "users" instead of "readers" you wanted substantially more dynamic functionality than that. – Andrew Gorcester Oct 31 '12 at 01:03
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    Basically, the popular huge PHP CMS-driven sites do everything I mentioned: they have a team of systems engineers, they make compromises on both functionality and speed and they get creative about avoiding database access. – Andrew Gorcester Oct 31 '12 at 01:05
  • Mashable uses wordpress login ...http://www.mashable.com/wp-admin – user1787184 Oct 31 '12 at 01:42
  • It's all PHP and MYSQL anyway .. Joomla is made of PHP and MYSQL. There's really no reason why it couldn't scale with all the needed resources. – user1787184 Oct 31 '12 at 01:43
  • I disagree. If you are doing very aggressive caching and serving mostly static content then that is one thing, but if you get into all of the other stuff that PHP CMSes do with the database, like comment handling, then you will hit a brick wall in terms of performance. Making dynamic, interactive sites scale to the level of Facebook or Twitter requires a team of professionals and typically a lot of custom technology. – Andrew Gorcester Oct 31 '12 at 02:21
  • Well , just got the answer in the Joomla forum and all of them agree that Joomla can scale quite well ... Not that I dont respect your input . It can scale with database optimization and the right servers. www.mashable.com runs on WORDPRESS by the way .. It's one of the most visited website with high traffic. – user1787184 Oct 31 '12 at 03:38
  • re: Mashable using Wordpress login, I imagine they do that for their editors and publishers but not for users. The idea is that any large-scale PHP CMS on MySQL deployment will have to minimize database writes and content changes by users at all costs, unlike your examples of Twitter and Facebook which are totally designed around user participation that results in database writes and very frequently updating dynamic content. If those sites just served mostly static content then they wouldn't be the logistics nightmares they are. – Andrew Gorcester Oct 31 '12 at 05:14
  • I'd also add that ebay use Joomla. So I guess they don't have any issues with millions of users ;) – George Wilson Oct 31 '12 at 09:41
  • Haha, for their *employees*, not for their customers! – Andrew Gorcester Oct 31 '12 at 15:19
  • well if you had a site like that obviously you would be doing all kind s of stuff but http://quizilla.com runs on a really old version of the Joomla framework and it does quite well. http://www.juggle.com/quizilla-com – Elin Nov 02 '12 at 00:36
  • I'd be interested in learning more about what features of Joomla they use as-is and what they have to modify -- although they are of course not even in the ballpark of Twitter and Facebook! – Andrew Gorcester Nov 02 '12 at 01:01