Question

How much traffic can the question2answer script handle?

For example, the questions will be 12 million or more, the answers about 20 million.

As a test, I hosted over 3 million questions and answers on a local host and the speed was quite high.

And if the traffic will be more than 200 000 per day and above?

Share, your opinion, please. And on server requirements.

Answer 1

This server:

• AMD Ryzen™ 5 3600
• CPU: 6 cores / 12 threads @ 3.6 GHz
• RAM: 64 GB DDR4
• Drives: 2 x 512 GB NVMe SSD

is using 10 GB RAM, around 20 GB of the SSD. Although, in practice, almost 100% is used of the RAM as cache and much more is used of the SSD to backup and other random stuff.

Additional considerations:

• There are 10 million posts in the site
• An external web caching service has been configured
• Strictly speaking there is another web caching layer from the ad system which caches some additional stuff
• Amount of web requests per second that are handled by the web server (not handled by the external caches) oscillate between 4 and 13 per second
• memcached is setup and is eating around 1GB of cache
• DB is tweaked enough and queries don't take more than 1 second
• Web server is also tweaked, as well as a few Q2A installation steps that have been tweaked
• My unofficial Q2A branch is in use
• Q2A has been properly configured to focus on performance (e.g. no hotness recalculation is being made)
• Q2A search has been removed, including word indexing, which has been replaced by Google search

The server works pretty well. In fact, the caching system from the ad system makes it slower, actually. I'm sure it will be able to handle many more posts.

Answer 2

The performance of the Question2Answer script depends on various factors such as the server hardware, software, and configuration, the database size, the number of concurrent users, and the complexity of the site's code and design.

Based on your description, if your site has more than 12 million questions and 20 million answers, and receives more than 200,000 visits per day, it can potentially require a powerful server to handle the traffic and maintain a good user experience. The server requirements can vary depending on the configuration, but generally, you would need a high-end server with sufficient resources such as RAM, CPU, storage, and bandwidth.

To optimize the performance of your Question2Answer site, you can consider the following best practices:

• Use a caching plugin to reduce the database load and improve the page loading speed.
• Optimize the database tables to improve the query performance and reduce the server load.
• Use a content delivery network (CDN) to distribute the static assets and reduce the server load.
• Use a reverse proxy server such as Nginx or Apache to handle the incoming traffic and cache the responses.
• Use a load balancer to distribute the traffic among multiple servers to improve the scalability and availability of your site.

By following these best practices and using a powerful server, you should be able to handle high traffic volumes and maintain a good user experience on your Question2Answer site. However, it's recommended to perform load testing and monitoring to identify any bottlenecks or performance issues and optimize the site accordingly.