ContentTeller server load and requirements

Yes, the new HTML caching system is only database based. However, the queries to the database server are extremely low (2 queries) if you turn off all stats features and the caching system on. You shouldn’t see any negative impact especially you run vBulletin as well.

The new caching system itself is much more efficient then the old file cache. The original caching system wrote the data in multiple files, while the new system is writing the entire HTML output into a database field to request it later with a single query.

ContentTeller server load and requirements

Is there no file caching in the new software at all? Thats kind of the only reason I liked the first version as my MySQL database is too overloaded as it is without good file cache. I'd use the old system but its vBulletin integration was far too weak.

ContentTeller server load and requirements

1) What kind of server configuration would you recommend for CT for a large site like TechSpot? In other words, how do you think CT compares to ST in terms of server load?
(some background...) As you know I'm coming from ST and I keep running a single server, dual Xeon with 2gb RAM and fast SCSI drives. That server so far has been good for serving over 8 million page views using ST and vbulletin, although just recently I started to feel some lag if I run something else in the background (eg. urchin stats).

This is hard to tell and depend on the server and installed software. Storyteller and Contentteller handle the resources completely different.

Storyteller is generating many smaller caching files in the file system, so there are very few queries to the database server. Contentteller on the other side is storing everything in the database and nothing in the file system.

Both ways have advantages and disadvantages. The major advantage of the file caching way is that it takes much less memory and CPU usage because the database server is doing nothing. The downside is that it can come to slow down or time outs while clearing/writing the cache on systems with huge news databases. It comes even in some cases to file corruptions. The later usual happens on underpowered shared servers with slow hard disk and a few hundreds accounts on it.

The major advantage of the database caching is that it is extremely fast even with huge databases. The downside is a higher memory usage and additional CPU load that comes from the MySQL server. However, it should help to tweak some settings in my.cnf to keep the CPU load low.

The average server load on the Warp2Search server (3-4 million pageviews) is in the 0.30 range on an Athlon 64 Dual Core server with 2GB Ram and 3ware RAID controller with 2 SATA harddisks. The machine is currently running the AMD64 (native 64-bit) port of Debian 4.0 along with Apache 2.2 MPM Worker, PHP 5.2 over FastCGI, and MySQL 5.0.32.

2) Have you ever been able to compare ST or CT to other popular blog and CMS software in terms of server power needed? In particular Wordpress, Drupal or Joomla?
These usually are plain php coded and use caching in the form of plug-ins.

No, I haven’t benchmarked them yet. I run couple of years a benchmark between Storyteller and PHP-Nuke. Storyteller was around 4 times faster due to the caching system.