Hi KK,

Being new to CouchCMS (testing it locally right now and loving it) and not having any live project running yet, I would like to ask 2 questions relating to size and performance.

Firstly, generally speaking - for a website running on a low- to medium-prized shared server (my typical customer's situation) - could you give an approximate estimate on the maximum number of pages (mostly text and pictures) a CouchCMS website can accomodate without incurring performance problems and having to create extra caching measures beyond those inherent to a typical CouchCMS installation?
In other words: What is the realistic performance range of a CouchCMS run website? Is it just targetted at smaller websites, or even at medium-sized ones? Where are the limits that I would have to bear in mind when choosing it for a customer's project? This is not yet clear to me.

Secondly, more specifically - in a posting by another member, I saw how big the htaccess file gets after running gen_htaccess.php for Pretty URLS after just 11 pages or so [http://www.couchcms.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=6971]. Thinking of a blog with potentially hundreds of entries, the htaccess file must get extremely large? I am no expert on RewriteRules, and the only other CMS I've used so far is MODx (Evo), but there I just need a small htaccess file. Is there a way to avoid having so many RewriteRules for every single page (except not using Pretty URLS)?

In a htaccess guide I read the following:

You can have a very large htaccess file - but remember that the server must parse each and every line in the file, for every page request it gets - so this could add up to a lot of overhead on a shared server. Caching can help minimise this, if set up correctly. If your htaccess file is large, and you run a dynamic site like a CMS or ecommerce application, then it is up to you to arrange suitable caching within your website application. [url]Source: http://www.a3webtech.com/index.php/htaccess-guide.html[/url]

Have you got any performance related experience from your own tests?

I would be grateful for any infos on the above aspects - and please, bear in mind that I am a complete CouchCMS beginner, having no experience with productive Couch sites yet, but looking forward to starting soon.

Thanks!

Solaris

[KK]

Hi Solaris,

From what I have seen in the past year and a half since Couch's introduction -
we haven't had a single report of either a user or (as happens more commonly) his web host complaining about Couch being a performance bottleneck.

You can safely build any medium sized site using Couch. Nested-pages do have a constraint on their numbers but you can, literally, have tens of thousands of regular cloned pages if required.
Just turn on Couch's caching and you are as good as serving plain static HTML pages - trust me. The process only involves firing up PHP. Couch core does not load. Nor is the database invoked. Just the cached static file is served.

As for your question regarding .htaccess file -

I saw how big the htaccess file gets after running gen_htaccess.php for Pretty URLS after just 11 pages or so..Thinking of a blog with potentially hundreds of entries, the htaccess file must get extremely large? I

Those are not actually pages. The entries you saw were for the templates.
In Couch, each template that you add (gets displayed in the admin panel's sidebar) gets an entry in the .htaccess file. So, the blog that you mentioned will only have one fixed section in .htaccess file regardless of the number of blog entries you might have.

A typical site does not need any more than 7-8 templates. Even if the figure goes higher, remember that the code executing the .htaccess is that of your web server's - this is the highly optimized, tight C code that makes up Apache. You'll need some seriously large .htaccess file before you begin to see it affect the performance.

Hope this answers your queries.

Hi KK,

Hope this answers your queries.

It does indeed, and, as always, very convincingly so.
Thanks a lot for taking the time!

I am glad I found this great CMS.

Solaris