Introduction

Welcome to the Escenic Community Expansion Performance Guide. Getting a web site to perform well is a great challenge and adding thousands of logged in users, user generated content, personalisation and integration with 3rd party content to the mix only raises the bar.

Albeit a great challenge, getting all the server components to play nicely together is a great treat and ultimately gives the users of the site a better experience and ensures that the site has the best foundations for becoming a success.

This guide is meant as a starting point for identifying the challenges in this context and, even more importantly, solving them. It is assumed that the reader has a good understanding of the Escenic Content Engine, Unix (or GNU/Linux) server administration, networking, web servers, application servers, databases and cache servers. The guide is meant as a supplement to the Escenic Content Engine Install and Admin guides as well as the Escenic Community Expansion Install Guide.

The guide is meant to be as general as possible, but where ever we discuss numbers (of servers etc), the text assumes you are building a community in the area of 50 000 simultaneous users.

The architecture in the following diagram should cater for such a number and has all the components discussed in the following chapters.