Umbraco: How many nodes are too many?

Question

Is it possible to have too many nodes in the umbraco cms? I'm currently taking over development of an umbraco site which will have user-generated content and a commenting system. If I were to store all this data as content nodes, will the system scale gracefully?

I understand that the entire content is held as xml in runtime memory -- so it seems like a bad idea to be treating the cms as a datastore for user comments if this will cause runtime memory to grow and grow. However, that's the way suggested to me by someone who knows much more about umbraco than I do.

Is it common in umbraco to do things this way?

Answer 1

I know there are some very large (50,000+ content items) websites out there running Umbraco. Whether it's a good idea to implement a commenting system that stores comments within the content tree is difficult to say. If the web server has enough memory, I believe you can have hundreds of thousands of nodes without any problem.

Most commenting implementations in Umbraco that I have seen have been in their own custom tables within the Umbraco database. Though I have built a commenting system for a blog very quickly and effectively by just storing comments as hidden sub-nodes of posts and I know others have too. Using the content tree to store comments saves you from having to cache anything yourself, Umbraco would cache comments in the same way it caches the content - which is very effective.

The back-office is where it slows down with the more nodes you have, especially if you have lots of nodes on a single level within the content tree.

Here are some Umbraco forum posts relating to scalability:

http://our.umbraco.org/forum/core/general/8500-Umbraco-Scalabilityhow-big-is-too-big-for-an-umbracoconfig-file

http://our.umbraco.org/forum/core/general/4124-Umbraco-scalability