Large scale usage of ProcessWire

[CaelanStewart]

Hi All,

We (the company I work for) used ProcessWire for a large internal resource library for an international company. It currently has 1,500+ active users, and hosts lots of documents and videos. It is expected to grow much larger in the near future too.

The main point of this post is to ask if anybody else has used ProcessWire for similar things, and whether you have any tips to keep optimal performance.

On a side note: We have noticed some strange behaviour occurring in the back end sometimes, such as a random delete field with a checkbox appearing in repeaters that don't have a field labeled "Delete", sometimes the CKEditors on a page won't initialise and leave a standard textarea, and sometimes the user listing page doesn't load first time. None of these are particularly impeding, as it doesn't happen too often.

It is currently using ProcessWire 2.5.3, which we will be upgrading to the latest version soon, as we are in the process of adding new functionality, such as a per-user blog/comments system with an approval system.

[DaveP]

(Answering one tiny bit of the original post.)

The 'delete' checkbox you see occasionally is usually hidden by CSS and is to enable the 'trashcan' functionality in the repeater head. This suggests that your site sometimes doesn't load all the backend CSS.

[Joss]

Yes, Dave is right and that sounds like a performance issue - not so much with ProcessWire perhaps but with the server not loading resources. I have had that once or twice on shared servers when there has been a heavy load on the server (not my site specifically). 

Interestingly, I had a particularly bad day a few weeks ago when someone else on the shared server was being attacked, but it was interesting to compare systems. My PW sites were as slow as hell, but were just about hanging in there. However, my one remaining WP site was on its knees crying for mercy!

[CaelanStewart]

Sorry all, forgot I posted this, I am still interested.

(Answering one tiny bit of the original post.)

The 'delete' checkbox you see occasionally is usually hidden by CSS and is to enable the 'trashcan' functionality in the repeater head. This suggests that your site sometimes doesn't load all the backend CSS.

We did have a problem with a site I developed, also using ProcessWire (you can see it at http://www.guyhollaway.co.uk/). We used the AllInOneMinifier (AIOM) plugin, and the CSS files did not load sometimes. This has since been resolved.

Yes, Dave is right and that sounds like a performance issue - not so much with ProcessWire perhaps but with the server not loading resources. I have had that once or twice on shared servers when there has been a heavy load on the server (not my site specifically). 

Interestingly, I had a particularly bad day a few weeks ago when someone else on the shared server was being attacked, but it was interesting to compare systems. My PW sites were as slow as hell, but were just about hanging in there. However, my one remaining WP site was on its knees crying for mercy!

I'm pretty sure it's not our server's performance. We have a 4GB Linode VPS running our websites, and average load is still relatively low. Most of our sites on the server run through cloudflare, we have automatic gzipping of resources on most sites, our server is pretty well optimised.