I am building a subscription site for a client, they expect there to be over a million users (total, not concurrent), when it officially launches.
The site has very basic functionality, it is a paid subscription site where users create a profile that includes images (profile pic and gallery), text fields, categories and a short video clip.
They can then view a clickable grid of users (planning on using a grid view for this) that opens to the users profile page.
I will likely be using AWS for hosting, specifically EC2, RDS and S3 to offload images and short video clips (1 min or less).
My question is whether you know of any cases where toolset has been used on this scale, and if so what was the impact on performance if any?
Initially the estimated user count was 100k tops, but that has drastically changed so if toolset will be a limiting factor for this please let me know.
It's really difficult to answer that question, because I don't think anyone has ever attempted anything even close in terms of size, as far as I know.
I've come across sites with 1000s of users, maybe even 10000 users, but not 100k and certainly nothing like a million.
Toolset of course has overhead, as any general purpose tool has, but it really isn't possible to say what limits you are going to run into when scaling such a site until you try it and see.
Which isn't a great development stategy.
My honest answer is that I do not think any general purpose tool would be right for such a job—I'm not even sure WordPress is the right tool for the job—and that a project of such scale merits a bespoke solution designed specifically for the task.
I suspect you would at least want to be using custom database tables for optimised storage and—in particular—querying.
You don't say which users would be shown in the grid, but presumably it is a subset based upon some filtering of user fields, and if that were user meta from their profile, the queries based on WordPress's existing tables and indexes are going to be horribly unperformant at anything like that kind of scale (irrespective of any overhead Toolset adds).
Thank you for the info Nigel, I really appreciate it. Unfortunately the million user project (as with many) is dead in the water now anyway. The 100k is still on the table though, we will see how it all goes down!
