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It’s very easy to screw up a conversion project but it can also be easily avoided if you follow these rules... Can You Put 100,000 Articles Into Joomla?
We looked for this answer, but none was to be found. Can Joomla do large websites? That was our question and here is our answer...
For the sake of this post, a large website, Joomla or any other, is more than 50,000 articles. For most, this would never even be a concern. But for those with large aspirations, the answer is yes and no.
Somewhere around 60,000 articles, Joomla starts to have issues, at least in a shared hosting environment. Granted, if you have 60K+ articles, you shouldn't be in a shared environment.
What we did was load up a fresh copy of Joomla 1.5.15, then started stuffing it with 10,000 articles at a time. We then went about our business, as though we were maintaining the site. Adding, editing, clicking front and back to see what would happen. Up through 50,000, there really was very little hesitation. We had cache turned off and loaded up some front end modules so home page reloads were tugging on the DB. Even up through 60,000 all was well.
When we got to 70K, our shared server started to complain, likely due to the memory_limit of 64M.
Search on the front end, was just fine. It would still report accurately in just under 6 seconds. Loading the home page, or any of the articles listed in the side modules-- lickety-split, under 4 seconds. From the user perspective, the front end was just fine. However, it was the back end where we hit the wall. In trying to edit any article, we got this overflow:
Fatal error: Allowed memory size of xxx bytes exhausted
(tried to allocate yyy bytes) in ...libraries/joomla/html/html/list.php on line 102
We tried bumping the memory of the offending script using a set_ini command, but we didn't get past the error. It's very likely the data center who provides this shared account will not allow us past the 64M limit. We have however submitted a ticket to ask for their input.
We intentionally are running this test on a shared server as we're certain we could get past 70K if we had full control of php.ini. However, because most Joomla sites run in a shared mode, we figured this would be the most useful to the Joomla community.
If you want to click around in our 70K articles, visit SpankMyJoomla.com.
Have any input on this topic? Please share
Conclusion: Within cPanel there is way to tweak your php.ini for your domain, however there is no way to bump memory_limit above 64M. The response from the data center: "If you want more memory, then upgrade your account." What we will do is reduce the number of articles in our test site until the backend functions return, so to arrive at an almost accurate answer about how many articles Joomla can handle in shared hosting environment.
