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[John Joseph Bachir <jjb AT ibiblio.org>]

An email I just sent that I thought some of y'all might be interested in.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 27 Mar 2006 00:20:55 -0500 (EST)
From: John Joseph Bachir <jjb AT ibiblio.org>
To: Stuart Maxwell <stuart AT amanzi.co.nz>
Subject: Re: Lyceum scalabilty...

Hi Stuart. Thanks for your interest in Lyceum.

On Mon, 27 Mar 2006, Stuart Maxwell wrote:

> In the long-run how will Lyceum keep up with the Wordpress development? 
> Surely as you guys progress you'll start branching further and further away 
> from Wordpress and I was wondering how you would be able to merge changes 
> from Wordpress into Lyceum. I guess I'm concerned that Lyceum will become too 
> far removed from Wordpress.

It's actually easier than you think. Using diff and merge, we can merge in code 
changes, view and resolve conflicts. Right now Lyceum is sychnronized with 
WordPress 2.01. We are waiting for 2.1 to come out before we synchronize again.

> I asked this question about MU Wordpress in the MU forums but got little 
> response. How well does Lyceum scale and what architecture do you invision in 
> large environments?

We haven't done any performance testing yet. We envision a site of the scale 
you are initially speaking of (1,000-100,000 blogs) being able to run with one 
high performance, dedicated database server. Memory capacities are increasing 
with each generation of hardware, so it's not unreasonable to assume that you 
will always be able to have a database server with more RAM than the size of 
your database (here at ibiblio our main database server has 16 gigs of ram for 
a database that is about 9 gigs).

And of course there is always the option of clustering, which is the 
traditional solution to high database load. This means setting up 2 or more 
physical machines which "appear" to be 1 database server to the clients. You 
would have to have a very busy site for this to be necessary though.


> I know that Lyceum came about because of the perceived lack of scalabilty in 
> MU Wordpress - specifically with the database structure.

Actually, Lyceum was conceived before we really knew about WordPress MU. We 
were surprised to discover the project about a year and a half ago, but after 
looking into its goals and design decided to go ahead with Lyceum.


> I'm currently in the process of designing a blogging solution and have been 
> using MU Wordpress, but I keep reading that MU gets too complex because of 
> the large amount of tables. How does Lyceum get around this

Lyceum uses 12 tables and does not create new tables after installation.


> how does Lyceum scale if multiple database servers are required?

Essentially all database applications will scale almost linearly with hardware. 
Meaning, 2 clustered database servers will provide almost 2 times the 
throughput as 1 database server, 3 clustered servers will provide almost 3 
times the throughput, and so on.

Let me know if you have any further questions.

John
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