Using alfresco or CMS in an internet application

[mzafer]

Apologies for this dumb question, is it a good idea use Alfresco or any other CMS in an internet application. I am just wondering how will the performance of a CMS solution be under high volume and the impact to response time etc.. in an internet application

Thanks
Mohamed

[rdanner]

Apologies for this dumb question, is it a good idea use Alfresco or any other CMS in an internet application. I am just wondering how will the performance of a CMS solution be under high volume and the impact to response time etc.. in an internet application

Thanks
Mohamed

Mohamed,

This is certainly not a dumb question.  I guess the first question is what do you consider high volume?  Not knowing anything about what kind of traffic or transactions you are talking about Id be willing to wager the following.  I think the answer is yes.  Backing your website up with a content repository and services can be a very strong and scalable solution.  There are many deployment/delivery strategies that work well for high volumes. 

We have taken up to 200K page views an hour which (given our page density, that is about 1700 requests / second.) A lot of people would not call that high volume.  It's not low volume either   We basically run off apache/jboss/mysql.  I am not worried at all about backing our site with a repository.  Evidently every asset is not/will not be streamed out of the repository on every request – that doesnt make sense for us. The benifits that can be harvested by the website in terms of access to metadata and content services which offer some pretty wonderful tools for dynamic sites is a easy tradeoff for me.

I think the strategy you take for managing and delivering your website and content really depends on your needs; maybe you can share some more details with us?

[mzafer]

Dear Russ,

Thanks for the reply. By volume I meant the traffic and 1700 req/sec is a good volume and definitly answers my question. I am still evaluating and yet to come up with a strategy. Basically I want all my content to be managed in a repository, but there are some pieces for which I may have to connect to a database too. What bundle of alfresco are you using. are you using portlets..?

Mohamed

[rdanner]

Dear Russ,

Thanks for the reply. By volume I meant the traffic and 1700 req/sec is a good volume and definitly answers my question. I am still evaluating and yet to come up with a strategy. Basically I want all my content to be managed in a repository, but there are some pieces for which I may have to connect to a database too. What bundle of alfresco are you using. are you using portlets..?

Mohamed

Mohamed,

We are not using the alfresco portlets from liferay(like the revese proxy portlet).  We are using a basic installation of alfresco.  On the website side we are developing it as repository only.  Like I said we dont stream the content out on every request we retrieve items, run transforms etc and cache the outputs.  I want to make sure you are clear we do not hit the repository on every request.  I dont know one way or the other how that would work out. 

We use liferay and it makes requests to the database for each portlet on the screen on every request to check for permissions.  This generates too much database traffic (considering they are guest pages and basically have no permissions)  In order to make it perform we ended up caching entire pages which I did not really want to do. 

Alfresco has a very pluggable infrastructure you could add (if it does not exist already) some sort of caching around retrival in the node service.  Or you could cache static pages with a servlet filter like OSCache.  In any event I would avoid wailing on the database.

[mzafer]

Thanks Russ

Mohamed