Can MySQL handle this...

whaites

I'm proposing taking a site which features 5000+ (and growing by about 10-20 per day) flat file articles of 5000+ characters each and putting them in a database with a full text index to allow for a search engine, dynamic content, and admin utilities. Given that the site at present is getting 30,000 unique session hits/day, can MySQL handle that kind of a load?

Each page would likely hit the database to retrieve an article and again for appropriate advertising. Would this kind of load cause concern? I am also considering using MySQL to create flat cache files to be served by apache--but this does not allow for the ads to be fully dynamic based on the content, which is desired.

Are the other performance concerns when the traffic level is that high?

Thanks

nnichols

Shouldn't be a problem. We have sites serving much more than that with mysql on the backend.

It is more dependant on your hardware than the db. If you can serve it on your existing server without the db, you can almost certainly serve it with a db.

chads2k2

Right on nnichols! I agree with you completely! IT does depend on your hardware and not solely on your software. MySQL is a very strong database when it comes to having many hits and people using it. However watch your install of MySQL ... make sure it has a high connection level and don't hold connections too long. Watch your code for this. When the connection isn't needed any longer then DISCONNECT!!!! 🙂 Lata... good call on this one Nick!

tha_mink

Actually, with that kind of dataset, the software is quite important. But not the mysql software, rather, the software you write to extract, update, and search the data. You could really screw yourself with searches or complex joins on such a large dataset if you're not carefull.

So your SQL is the most important thing in my opinion as far as performance is concerned when dealing with larger datasets.

nnichols

That is definitely true, but 5000 rows with fields of 5000 chars is not a large amount to search through, even on the puniest of servers.

Badly written SQL can screw up any application from a performance point of view.

whaites

Thanks for the responses--
In terms of a risky SQL statement under this type of load, would using MYSQL's MATCH...AGAINST to search FULLTEXT INDEX fields be a bad idea? Is there a more efficient way to keyword search 5000+ textfields of 5000+chars?

Thanks!

whaites

Also, with respect to hardware-what would be some good guidelines in looking for a web-host?

Thanks!

tha_mink

Just make sure your host is running some kind of unix OS; solaris, linux, whatever. It doesn't matter what kinda hardware they're running since most isps these days have good enough hardware.

Just don't get a windows web-host.

Sadmin

seems this question is well answered by the previous posts...but
I'm designing a web app for an educational public institution, for multimedia learning, for that point i've decided to work with mysql & php (apache)
Mysql will be running on Win2k or winXP OS - my question is about performance
can it suppor a DB with about 10000 registers of questions, each one with 4 or 5 choices?
it's planned to be a local web app, but in the case i'd want to use it in remote web mode, how many concurrent DB connections / accesses would mysql server support.
(a PC with xp and p4 processor 256 RAM will be enough good?)
thanks

tha_mink

It really depends more on how your SQL is written than the hardware/os you're running on. Good SQL runs faster than bad SQL.