# How big is your Radiant site? **URL:** \ **Category:** Radiant CMS\ **Created:** [May 22, 2007, 5:36pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/how-big-is-your-radiant-site/104798 "2007-05-22T17:36:47Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 18\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Andrew\_OSBrien](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/a/d6d6ee/32.png) [@Andrew\_OSBrien](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Andrew_OSBrien)\ **Post date:** [May 22, 2007, 5:36pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/how-big-is-your-radiant-site/104798/1 "2007-05-22T17:36:47Z")
So I was wondering, what’s the record for most pages on a radiant install? Don’t be shy, people! Whose content reigns supreme? More to the point, have you found that the amount of pages have an effect on Radiant’s performance? -Andrew ---
**Author:** ![Andrew\_OSBrien](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/a/d6d6ee/32.png) [@Andrew\_OSBrien](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Andrew_OSBrien)\ **Post date:** [May 22, 2007, 5:51pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/how-big-is-your-radiant-site/104798/2 "2007-05-22T17:51:49Z")
On Tue, 22 May 2007, Andrew O’Brien wrote: > So I was wondering, what’s the record for most pages on a radiant > install? Don’t be shy, people! Whose content reigns supreme? I have one Radiant site. It has three articles. > More to the point, have you found that the amount of pages have an > effect on Radiant’s performance? Really not. I’m very happy that the performance wasn’t noticably affected when we tripled our content. Chris ---
**Author:** ![Andrew\_OSBrien](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/a/d6d6ee/32.png) [@Andrew\_OSBrien](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Andrew_OSBrien)\ **Post date:** [May 22, 2007, 6:07pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/how-big-is-your-radiant-site/104798/3 "2007-05-22T18:07:50Z")
removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid wrote: > Really not. I’m very happy that the performance wasn’t noticably affected > when we tripled our content. Haha, same here. Plus Radiant’s caching system additionally reduces the load on my database. Andrew: You may want to avoid deep directory hierarchies on your site due to the recursive database queries Radiant performs. Oliver ---
**Author:** ![Andrew\_OSBrien](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/a/d6d6ee/32.png) [@Andrew\_OSBrien](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Andrew_OSBrien)\ **Post date:** [May 22, 2007, 6:12pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/how-big-is-your-radiant-site/104798/4 "2007-05-22T18:12:51Z")
> Andrew: You may want to avoid deep directory hierarchies on your site > due to the recursive database queries Radiant performs. > > Oliver Oh, good point. How deep is “deep”? Does radiant execute a query for each level of the page tree that it traverses (and on each request)? Could some kind of caching solution like memcached (or even just storing it in memory) be used instead (or is it already)? Thanks, Andrew ---
**Author:** ![Andrew\_OSBrien](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/a/d6d6ee/32.png) [@Andrew\_OSBrien](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Andrew_OSBrien)\ **Post date:** [May 22, 2007, 6:23pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/how-big-is-your-radiant-site/104798/5 "2007-05-22T18:23:52Z")
Andrew O’Brien wrote: > > Andrew: You may want to avoid deep directory hierarchies on your site > > due to the recursive database queries Radiant performs. > > > > Oliver > > Oh, good point. How deep is “deep”? Does radiant execute a query for > each level of the page tree that it traverses (and on each request)? > Could some kind of caching solution like memcached (or even just > storing it in memory) be used instead (or is it already)? Radiant has built-in caching, one of Radiant’s main features in fact. With this caching being enabled it does not need to query the database at all when a cached page is requested. This, however, is likely to conflict with your plans of fine grained authorization. Without caching I believe Radiant needs to execute one database query per hierarchy level to find the right page, though I am not sure if Rails does some magic and caches database records. Memcached might help here. Oliver ---
**Author:** ![Andrew\_OSBrien](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/a/d6d6ee/32.png) [@Andrew\_OSBrien](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Andrew_OSBrien)\ **Post date:** [May 22, 2007, 6:28pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/how-big-is-your-radiant-site/104798/6 "2007-05-22T18:28:53Z")
I’m testing Radiant here: [http://www.euemeu.com/](http://www.euemeu.com/) Sometimes it takes to much time to open the pages(only 3 or 4 for now), but i don’t know if its problem of Dreamhost or if its my internet conection… I’ve tried in different places but the delay don’t reduces. I’m using the package version(not gem) radiant 0.6.1. How can I test if its slowness is guilt of Dreamhost or not? Thanks a lot. Sylvestre ---
**Author:** ![Andrew\_OSBrien](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/a/d6d6ee/32.png) [@Andrew\_OSBrien](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Andrew_OSBrien)\ **Post date:** [May 22, 2007, 6:32pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/how-big-is-your-radiant-site/104798/7 "2007-05-22T18:32:53Z")
Seems pretty speedy to me. My guess is you’re experiencing “Dreamhost hell” like many people have on occasion. Sean ---
**Author:** ![Andrew\_OSBrien](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/a/d6d6ee/32.png) [@Andrew\_OSBrien](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Andrew_OSBrien)\ **Post date:** [May 22, 2007, 6:35pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/how-big-is-your-radiant-site/104798/8 "2007-05-22T18:35:53Z")
On Tue, 22 May 2007, Sylvestre Mergulhão wrote: > I’m testing Radiant here: [http://www.euemeu.com/](http://www.euemeu.com/) > I’m using the package version(not gem) radiant 0.6.1. How can I test > if its slowness is guilt of Dreamhost or not? Watch the log file. It will report how much time operations take. Sometimes on Dreamhost, those numbers are insane, like negative times. You can watch the log live with something like “tail -f log/production.log” in a console as you use the site. Chris ---
**Author:** ![Andrew\_OSBrien](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/a/d6d6ee/32.png) [@Andrew\_OSBrien](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Andrew_OSBrien)\ **Post date:** [May 22, 2007, 6:45pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/how-big-is-your-radiant-site/104798/9 "2007-05-22T18:45:57Z")
> You can watch the log live with something like “tail -f > log/production.log” in a console as you use the site. Ok, I will look that as son as I can. Opening the admin ([http://www.euemeu.com/admin](http://www.euemeu.com/admin)) it delayed 20 seconds(counted by fasterfox firefox extension) to open here… Its to much time Sylvestre Mergulhão ---
**Author:** ![Andrew\_OSBrien](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/a/d6d6ee/32.png) [@Andrew\_OSBrien](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Andrew_OSBrien)\ **Post date:** [May 22, 2007, 7:30pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/how-big-is-your-radiant-site/104798/10 "2007-05-22T19:30:07Z")
Andrew O’Brien wrote: > So I was wondering, what’s the record for most pages on a radiant > install? Don’t be shy, people! Whose content reigns supreme? The Ruby Web site has 712 pages and counting. > More to the point, have you found that the amount of pages have an > effect on Radiant’s performance? When pages are deeply nested or when a page has a ton of child pages it can slow things down. In general though, because of Radiant’s caching system, this isn’t a problem. – John L. [http://wiseheartdesign.com](http://wiseheartdesign.com) ---
**Author:** ![Andrew\_OSBrien](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/a/d6d6ee/32.png) [@Andrew\_OSBrien](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Andrew_OSBrien)\ **Post date:** [May 22, 2007, 8:03pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/how-big-is-your-radiant-site/104798/11 "2007-05-22T20:03:12Z")
> More to the point, have you found that the amount of pages have an > effect on Radiant’s performance? A site I’m working on right now has about 150 pages. > More to the point, have you found that the amount of pages have an > effect on Radiant’s performance? No impact that I’ve noticed. On May 22, 2007, at 10:35 AM, Andrew O’Brien wrote: > Search: [http://radiantcms.org/mailing-list/search/](http://radiantcms.org/mailing-list/search/) > Site: [http://lists.radiantcms.org/mailman/listinfo/radiant](http://lists.radiantcms.org/mailman/listinfo/radiant) * * * Ryan H. Art of Mission, Inc. 3720 Gattis School Rd #800 PMB 245 Round Rock, TX 78664 800-722-1492 (phone) [www.artofmission.com](http://www.artofmission.com) removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid ---
**Author:** ![Andrew\_OSBrien](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/a/d6d6ee/32.png) [@Andrew\_OSBrien](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Andrew_OSBrien)\ **Post date:** [May 22, 2007, 8:47pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/how-big-is-your-radiant-site/104798/12 "2007-05-22T20:47:19Z")
One Radiant site I run has over 160-pages under a single parent page; specifically: [Country Bus | Capital Area Rural Transportation System](http://ridecarts.com/service-to) While in the “Pages” admin area, expanding that particularly populous node will sometimes make the admin page hang and not load completely. Using Radiant 0.5.2; that site has not been upgraded to 0.6, yet. \*Mars – Web D. A3 Design > **[A3 Creative - Websites + Branding + Marketing](http://a3online.com)** > > A3 Creative is a full service agency for the digital age. Since 1996, we have helped businesses like yours transform their brand. ---
**Author:** ![Andrew\_OSBrien](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/a/d6d6ee/32.png) [@Andrew\_OSBrien](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Andrew_OSBrien)\ **Post date:** [May 23, 2007, 5:05pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/how-big-is-your-radiant-site/104798/13 "2007-05-23T17:05:26Z")
On 5/22/07, Andrew O’Brien [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) wrote: > So I was wondering, what’s the record for most pages on a radiant > install? Don’t be shy, people! Whose content reigns supreme? One of the sites that we’re running on a highly modified 0.5 is [http://www.grouptravelorganiser.com](http://www.grouptravelorganiser.com) It currently stands at around 250 pages and growing daily, all of which are served with no cacheing at all (on account of the login requirements) and with some quite poorly optimised recursive functions running in order to generate the left-hand navigation bar. More to the point, have you found that the amount of pages have an > effect on Radiant’s performance? We did run into some memory issues when there were 3 mongrel instances running on a 256MB slice, but dropping it down to 2 has sorted that out and the site is running reasonably quickly again. Occasionally there are still some slow pages but I’m hoping to get some cacheing turned back on in an up-coming rebuild that should eliminate that. Even as it currently stands I think we could double or triple the content on there without too much trouble. Kev ---
**Author:** ![Andrew\_OSBrien](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/a/d6d6ee/32.png) [@Andrew\_OSBrien](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Andrew_OSBrien)\ **Post date:** [May 24, 2007, 2:08am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/how-big-is-your-radiant-site/104798/14 "2007-05-24T02:08:37Z")
> > Andrew: You may want to avoid deep directory hierarchies on > > your site > > due to the recursive database queries Radiant performs. > > > > Oliver > > Oh, good point. How deep is “deep”? Does radiant execute a query for > each level of the page tree that it traverses (and on each request)? > Could some kind of caching solution like memcached (or even just > storing it in memory) be used instead (or is it already)? This is no longer a problem - Radiant will currently run one database query for each level of the page heirachy, but it’s only one query, which isn’t going to add up to anything significant for any reasonable value of ‘deep’ on a website. Cached pages don’t hit the database at all and get served much faster than via rail’s regular caching mechanism - It’s 5-10 times slower than serving a raw html page through apache, but you’ll probably find that that’s more than fast enough. Radiant previously had a problem with WIDE directory heirachies - every sibling would be loaded on the way down the tree - but that is no longer the case for pages the use the regular slug mechanism (ie, child url is /parent-url/slug) - Pages such as the ArchivePage that rewrite the child urls (to, ie. /parent-url/year/month/day/slug) will still exhibit that behaviour, but it’s a fairly simple problem to fix - I just have to get around to running benchmarks on it, which is a bit of a PITA. Back to the original question, I think I’m probably running the largest radiant site ([http://www.thegroggysquirrel.com](http://www.thegroggysquirrel.com)) - upwards of 1100 pages - most of these pages are in very wide heirachies (95% of my pages are direct children of either /comics or /articles) and have parent pages that rewrite their urls - pretty much the worst case scenario for radiant performance, but my site performs fine. Dan. ---
**Author:** ![Andrew\_OSBrien](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/a/d6d6ee/32.png) [@Andrew\_OSBrien](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Andrew_OSBrien)\ **Post date:** [May 22, 2007, 8:05pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/how-big-is-your-radiant-site/104798/15 "2007-05-22T20:05:12Z")
> Ok, I will look that as son as I can. Opening the admin > ([http://www.euemeu.com/admin](http://www.euemeu.com/admin)) it delayed 20 seconds(counted by > fasterfox firefox extension) to open here… Its to much time I’ve had this trouble with Dreamhost before. I think that Dreamhost has a garbage collector process that goes around and kills old Rails processes (or puts them to sleep or something). So your site might be responsive, but then when you open up admin, it has to start your application from scratch, which can take a while, like you observed. - Ryan On May 22, 2007, at 11:44 AM, Sylvestre Mergulhão wrote: > Search: [http://radiantcms.org/mailing-list/search/](http://radiantcms.org/mailing-list/search/) > Site: [http://lists.radiantcms.org/mailman/listinfo/radiant](http://lists.radiantcms.org/mailman/listinfo/radiant) * * * Ryan H. Art of Mission, Inc. 3720 Gattis School Rd #800 PMB 245 Round Rock, TX 78664 800-722-1492 (phone) [www.artofmission.com](http://www.artofmission.com) removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid ---
**Author:** ![Andrew\_OSBrien](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/a/d6d6ee/32.png) [@Andrew\_OSBrien](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Andrew_OSBrien)\ **Post date:** [May 24, 2007, 10:41am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/how-big-is-your-radiant-site/104798/16 "2007-05-24T10:41:42Z")
On 5/24/07, Mohit S. [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) wrote: > out how I can automate the loading of these pages into the database. I > > Anyhow, I’m barely learning to walk with Radiant, so things are still a > bit of a way off, also because this part is out of curiosity right now > and not any specific work project. It took me 45 minutes to get to see > my “Hello World” page with Radiant when I started with an “empty” > project, so there’s a bit of a way to go. But anyway, the time was not > wasted - I’m almost done putting the steps (simple in retrospective) > into my blog entry so that someone else can benefit! > > Cheers > Mohit. Hi, My own first Radiant website, actually for my wife’s nail salon business at home, has ten pages and a blog with fifteen posts. It also has a contact form, XML sitemap and RSS feed. According to Google Analytics, we received an astounding 353 unique visitors since November 2006, which viewed 2,578 pages. Our dedicated dual processor server handles this impressive load quiet efficiently. Radiant rulez! Thanks. J.M. Note: you can visit her at [http://ruby-on-nails.com/](http://ruby-on-nails.com/) and put a smile on her face by dropping a nice message using the Contact page, preferably in French. This website degrades badly on Windows/IE. Please use Linux/Firefox 😉 ---
**Author:** ![Andrew\_OSBrien](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/a/d6d6ee/32.png) [@Andrew\_OSBrien](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Andrew_OSBrien)\ **Post date:** [May 24, 2007, 11:07am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/how-big-is-your-radiant-site/104798/17 "2007-05-24T11:07:57Z")
As long as people are reporting success stories, I might as well add ours. [http://bitchkittyracing.com](http://bitchkittyracing.com) is chugging along with about 280 pages and a couple of hundred unique visitors a day. It has a lot of subsections presented on the front page, which led to fairly intensive MySQL queries, which surprise, surprise TextDrive couldn’t deal with. When we were still there, we had numerous crashes and persistent MySQL errors. eventually, I got annoyed enough to change servers and now things run great. I have a much smaller Raidant site at Textdrive now and it is fine. I think it has been running for several months without issue, but it is only a handful of pages and some photos. Something else to mention, my partner in crime had no html or programming training, but has picked up Markdown and Radius tags and is taking a very active role in maintaining the site. While some users are put off by the “technical” approach that Radiant takes, it can be easily learned. Keith B. Tel: +49-7731-79838380 removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid [http://keithbingman.com](http://keithbingman.com) [http://keith.bitchkittyracing.com](http://keith.bitchkittyracing.com) ---
**Author:** ![Andrew\_OSBrien](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/a/d6d6ee/32.png) [@Andrew\_OSBrien](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Andrew_OSBrien)\ **Post date:** [May 24, 2007, 10:11am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/how-big-is-your-radiant-site/104798/18 "2007-05-24T10:11:39Z")
Daniel S. wrote: > Back to the original question, I think I’m probably running the largest radiant site ([http://www.thegroggysquirrel.com](http://www.thegroggysquirrel.com)) - upwards of > 1100 pages - most of these pages are in very wide heirachies (95% of my pages are direct children of either /comics or /articles) > and have parent pages that rewrite their urls - pretty much the worst case scenario for radiant performance, but my site performs > fine. > > Dan Hi Dan, I think that’s good to hear! The site that I’m planning is going to start with a few technical manuals translated into HTML in perhaps 2 different languages. I’d say that I’m thinking of about 4 - 6 manuals x 200 pages each x 2 languages = approximately 2000 pages. So, naturally, I’m a bit worried but I think aggressive caching will solve this problem for me. But right now, I’m spending some more time of my time trying to figure out how I can automate the loading of these pages into the database. I read an earlier thread about updating the data by using ActiveRecord outside Rails/ Radiant and that seems to be one way. I don’t expect the content to change too much too frequently, so a slightly slow update will work for me! The more serious issue is in converting the PDF manual into the HTML while still maintaining the semantic meaning of the content. After that’s done, I need to work on finding a way to let people log in and add comments about the content - so, then I’ll be looking out at other extensions. Anyhow, I’m barely learning to walk with Radiant, so things are still a bit of a way off, also because this part is out of curiosity right now and not any specific work project. It took me 45 minutes to get to see my “Hello World” page with Radiant when I started with an “empty” project, so there’s a bit of a way to go. But anyway, the time was not wasted - I’m almost done putting the steps (simple in retrospective) into my blog entry so that someone else can benefit! Cheers Mohit.