Scalability: How many users can elgg have/handle?

Greetings!

Yes, I read the Performance documentation:

http://learn.elgg.org/en/1.x/admin/performance.html?highlight=scalability

However, I'm being asked if elgg can handle up to 200,000 users and 70,000 users connected at the same time. Is that possible?

I'm being asked because it is for an Implementation of PiGo LMS, an Elgg Powered Learning Management System, for a private project.

Only Server specs I have:

Dedicated CentOS Linux Server (Cloud Server)

4 GB of RAM

  • Sure. We've collected more tips about it in here

    Especially, I recommend to pay your attention to vazsco team advices

  • @RvR, I keep getting redirected to a different site when I try to view those links.

    @rjcalifornia, 70,000 users connected at the same time is quite a lot and 4GB of ram isn't going to cut it. Basic math if you assume 10MB per connection (a conservative estimate for Elgg, actually) , you'll need 700GB for 70,000 users at the same time. If you mean 70,000 queries per minute (as opposed to at exactly the same time) that still means over 10GB is needed if the requests are evenly spread over the hour.

    And that will be just enough memory to serve empty pages, not to mention database load, Apache max connections, loading entities into memory, etc.

  • @Evan That's what I'm afraid of. Thanks for the info.

    It is a virtual learning platform project, and it is aimed for students from all the schools in the country. It is a huge project and we are going to propose PiGo (Powered by Elgg) as a solution for the project. We are not the only competitors but we are pushing for it.

    It is a country wide implementation of this:

    http://community.elgg.org/showcase/view/1617017/pigo-e-learning-platform

  • To be fair, you would need similar or greater RAM for this many concurrent users if you ran a competing LMS like Moodle or Blackboard. Moodle, for instance, will typically handle only 10-20 concurrent users per GB, and will very happily gobble up 50MB of RAM per simultaneous user. 

  • A reasonable question to ask is will the developer staff be able to scale up with users? Vanilla Elgg install using common plugin-writing conventions I suspect will not cut it at all. But Elgg could get you a version 1 quickly you could then optimize/rewrite.

  • @Steve and @Jon Dron

    It is a cloud environment, a local custom cloud solution that it is going to be maintained by the client.

    We have been optimizing PiGo/Elgg and plan to use Squid to further improve the server load.

Performance and Scalability

Performance and Scalability

If you've got a need for speed, this group is for you.