Drupal vs vB

I was wondering, which set-up gives you the most bang for your buck.

Drupal.org has just upgraded their server which they say will be able to deliver: 30 million pages a month and 50,000 unique authenticated users per month. However they have spent 11k on their set-up!!

As part of our ongoing efforts to support the Drupal.org infrastructure, the Drupal Association has further bulked up our hardware resources with 10 GB of RAM and a new master database server. These improvements will help us deal with the exponential growth curve the Drupal community has been experiencing, and help us prepare for the anticipated growth due to Drupal 6.

The Drupal Association spent approximately $11,000 USD on hardware. To help pay for these upgrades and support the Drupal.org infrastructure, please purchase a membership (individual, organization). Your membership will help the association plan and spend money to support the Drupal.org infrastructure and Drupal events such as Drupalcons for the next 12 months.

You can learn about the evolving architecture of our infrastructure in these diagrams. You can learn about our efforts to scale the Drupal.org architecture in this presentation. You can also view a picture of the new database server.

These upgrades included 2GB RAM for each of three web servers and 4 GB for the database slave server. The new master database server is a a dual quad core Xeon processor with 16GB of RAM with four 15,000 RPM SCSI disks. We believe that this database hardware combined with new web servers should allow the Drupal.org infrastructure to double its capacity to 30 million pages a month and 50,000 unique authenticated users per month.

How well does vB fare? What kind of server set-up would you need to serve 30 million pages a month on vB? Anyone have any comparable set-ups they can tell us about?

While my big-board isn't quite up to 30M page impressions a month yet (!) it would be interesting to know which one gives you better mileage when it comes to high traffic sites

[Analogpoint]

I think it's kind of hard to compare, because vB allows you to run a cache daemon on a separate server, as well as have multiple database servers (master & slaves) to spread the load.

But it's a good question. I hope someone who is more knowledgeable will chime in.

[weeno]

I agree that it is weird to compare the two as they seem somewhat different.

My forum (by itself) served almost 15 million page views in the last 30 days, and we just upgraded to a two PHP server (dual clovertown, 4GB RAM each), one mysql (dual clovertown, 4GB RAM, RAID 10 15k scsi) config. we didn't buy the hardware outright, however, so costs can't be compared directly.

I don't know what the capacity of this server setup is, but I would think there would be a lot of room to grow on it. 30 million a month? dunno... guess we'll see.

arn

[Razasharp]

Hey I visit http://macrumors.com

Thanks for the info (you too Analogpoint!), please do keep us updated on how you get on. I also posted this topic on vb.com and George has posted some very helpful info - which will be of interest to anyone who runs a m a s s i v e forum!

http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showthread.php?t=248575

[briansol]

frankly, 11k is nothing when you start talking about infrastructure.

a load balancer and a top of the line pix is 10k