What CMS handle handle lots of content?

[denvercardonations]

My website has been up for 2 months, and I was getting error 508's, SQL errors, PHP timeout errors, etc. After weeks of my webhost blaming Joomla they sent me this:

Hello John,

We do understand your desire to have a website working flawlessly.
That is what we, as the hosting company, are trying to achieve as well.
We are sorry if our previous reply left you under impression that we accusing the CMS you are using of the issues you are currently experiencing.
That was not our intention - what we wanted to do is just describe and explain the logs Oksana has provided in most detailed way to give you full image of how the end-product (i.e. the index page of your site) is being generated.

However, it is true that the size of the database your site's using is far to big.
Let me explain myself further here: MySQL databases, as you may know, are just some amount of text data structured in a relational way, so that it can be easily accessed.
470 Mb of text is just about enough to get half of Library of Congress's books saved under your account (that is rough comparison just to give the idea of text stored under your account now).

We are very sorry that you have been advised to upgrade the hosting account without prior addressing of the root cause of the issue - that is our fault and it is true.
Simply upgrading the account would not get the issue sorted out. Mostly because how MySQL works.
The truth also is that even some of the most powerful dedicated servers will not guarantee the stability of the site in this situation.
What needs to be done is examining the database for duplicate entries - that may explain the time of query execution - for instance in query like this one:

| 827617 | stephbmn_nctest | localhost | stephbmn_step13 | Query | 5001 | Copying to tmp table | SELECT

'5001' is the time in seconds server waited for the query to complete. That is somewhere around 2 hours, whereas standard query on a database with the size of 100-200 Mb is 0.04 - 0.5 seconds

We are only trying to help you to resolve the issue completely.


---------
Regards,
Eugene N.
Level 2 Hosting Customer Support

I have articles, meeting lists, is it really too big? How can this be, I just use the basic CMS functions....

 

[Hawker]

Hi denver could you give us a few more details about your site and the current technology/platform it's running on?

I know it's not WordPress, seems to be some other kind of CMS is it Drupal or Joomla then?

As far as I'm aware, WordPress can handle large databases and sites with lots of content no problem. Especially if its optimised and running on a good hosting plan.

It sounds like your database is rather large. Have you ever optimised it or consulted the help of a MYSQL expert to help you optimise it?

It might be that you can probably loose a large percentage of the 470MB its using without loosing any of your articles, meeting lists etc.

Also, you may very well be able to migrate the site to WordPress which is the leader of all CMS's and might prevent these things happening to you with whatever CMS you're using now.

Just food for thought.

 

[denvercardonations]

Yes it is Joomla, I really didn't think running RSS feeds to content would fill it up so fast, I thought the SQL database would work like a filesystem on a desktop. You know, hold a terabyte of data and be able to do dozens of things all at once, as long as everything is organized! I don't really have so much money to spend hiring an SQL expert. The site is only 2 months old and I was going to index the local meetings since the organizations here do it so poorly. Their meetings are not indexed, it took me forever to actually find reliable information, so instead of the sql query they require, I am making seperate pages per meetings, with tags and pdfs..... *sigh* Maybe this is a little more of a complicated project than I thought.

 

[Ron Killian]

Ya, that seems awful big for a site database. But I don't know much about Joomla. Something doesn't seem right. Would be a very big database for a wordpress site.

If it was me, I would use myPHPAdmin to take a look at the database. You don't have to be an expert at SQL, it's just a tool you can use to work with your database. Most hosting plans, with cpanel offer it.

I say to use this tool because you can browse your database and it shows you the size of each part, row ect.. With it you can at least pin point where most of the space being used. Can show you where there might be a problem.

Even if you convert to Wordpress, you will probably still have the same issue. Doubt migrating is going to make for a smaller database.

If your talking about your donate car denver site, it's not surprising, there are ALOT of entires there. Is it really worth having all that? You might have a ton of content that NEVER gets used or read, could be a huge waste of space.

Just my thoughts.

 

[Mike001]

Something is definitely not right. I have developed and designed some really large content sites for some very big customers and had no where near a 470 MB database for a landing page.

Think about what that letter is stating, the data of a MySQL server properly configured only serves to the page that is called, that is the way that those servers are designed. What could possibility be calling 470MB of data for an index page. Something is not right.

Something else that concerns me is a comment he made about serving up a Tera Byte of data and doing dozens of things all at once with no impact. Not in our lifetimes. Let's be realistic, serving up a terabyte of data even across some of the fastest connects on the internet would take a significant amount of dedicated time, anything else occurring simultaneously we slow that connection down with each additional task. We don't deal with remote connections to Tera Bytes of date yet! Christ it is only been in the last couple of years we have been able to store Tera Bytes of data locally.

My suggestions.

Step One. Get off a prepackaged CMS, this is why most serious developers do not use them. They have way too much overhead and are very difficult to customize.

Step Two. Determine what you really want to do with this Blog. Most Blogs do not connect to RSS feeds.

Step Three. Understand that RSS feeds as cool as they are sometimes can be very process intensive. Not only that you are not controlling the content and on a good Blog the content / conversation is tightly controlled and maintained to grow audience. That is the whole point of the Blog to find different views a tightly controlled topics.

Step Four. Get a professional database administrator to help you setup the initial database. Have them setup the administrative features where you can maintain it, through an interface, once it is designed. Database design, integration, deployment, and optimization are a science. They are not done by the seat of the pants, especially on large databases and they need to be done correctly to satisfy your user base. Your users will expect a level of response from your site once that level is not met you will probably lose them forever. Very seldom do we go back to sites that are non-responsive.

Step Five. Change your domain name. My guess is if you have been running for 2 months with any type of measurable traffic on your site your first impression could have turned off a significant number of people that may not now revisit the site. This should be determined by the amount of traffic that you had seen come to the site and the bounce rate you were seeing of that traffic.

Step Six. Do not take the site live until it has been thoroughly tested. You would be amazed at how many people do not take this advice and end up losing a good domain name because the rushed the Go Live and now have built a negative reputation with that name.

By the way I missed the response to the initial question, I git so wrapped up the reading some of the responses.

What CMS handle handle lots of content?

All good CMS systems can handle a tremendous amount of content. The CMS Systems that are out there, WordPress, Joomal, Drupal, Expression Engine to name a few all have been tested and deployed against large data systems. They all perform well when properly configured. Most professionals developers do not use them for reasons I mentioned above, but they are still good system for what they were designed to do.

And one other point. You may hear people tell you that MySQL just was not designed or developed to support those types of data storage capacities. That is bunk. Some of the biggest databases in the world and largest websites in the world are support with MySQL databases. Facebook, Amazon (all though they are moving to a new system for security reasons), eBay are just a few of the thousands of professional system that are running on MySQL databases. That database system is so popular and so widespread in the World Wide Web, it was purchased by Oracle, it is still Open Source, and they say it will stay that way but they purchased it because many developers, myself included, design and develop on MySQL and deploy on Oracle.