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Akademika AS

Submitted by quaoar on Mon, 10/13/2008 - 09:33.
Akademika AS logo
Site URL: 
http://www.akademika.no
Developed by: 
Ny Media AS

This site sells books. One of the largest bookstores in Norway.

About the site:

  • Our largest Drupal / UberCart site to date
  • integreted with Lawson Movex (M3) ERP system by exchange of XML-files
  • integrated with several international book information providers - Nielsen Bookdata, Boknett, Bokrondellen
  • uses Sphinx as search engine
  • automatic import and update of products based on programs written in Python
  • will have credit card payment option from BBS
  • will be integrated with Feide (singel sign-on, http://feide.no/content.ap?thisId=1307) using SimpleSAML
  • very nice multi-step checkout
  • 3 product classes
  • 100% HTML/XHTML/CSS validated code
    http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.akademika.no&charset=(detect+automatically)&doctype=Inline&group=0

    http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/validator?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.akadem...

Database and other nerdy facts:

  • node count is 4,476,695 and increasing
  • uc_products count is 2,887,807 and increasing
  • 1.2 million product images
  • 3 million product descriptions / reviews
  • 800 queries per second on average
  • total size of data 30+ GB
  • around 75,000 product updates per day and 1000 inserts
  • 4,000+ terms

Other things of interest:

  • Changed every nid/vid field in the database to INT UNSIGNED - UberCart is standardized on mediumint
  • Had to avoid or hack a lot of custom modules because almost nothing is made for large scale sites. There seem to be a tendency to go for the "list all terms" or "list all nodes/products" way of doing things. Works perfectly ok for small sites, wrecks total havoc on large sites Sticking out tongue
  • a "fully operational" program written in Python for importing / updating products in Drupal / UberCart

However, there are still a lot of small bugs to sort out.

9.85714
Average: 9.9 (7 votes)
#1Submitted by zeezhao on Mon, 10/13/2008 - 10:16.

Re: Akademika AS

Great site! Also, thanks for some of the technical details. It must be one of the largest scale ubercart/drupal sites!

I am interested in this as we are working on something with over 1 million nodes & products.

A couple of questions, out of interest:
- which custom modules did you end up changing?

- what's the update speed for your upload python program e.g. how many products per min?

- what kind of machine spec are you running on?

Thanks

#2Submitted by Abilnet on Mon, 10/13/2008 - 11:50.

Re: Akademika AS

Oh what a cool site, huh... what a work have you done, congrats!

Yes, I liked very much the multi part checkout, is it based on the contrib module by half_brick?

There seems to be almost 300.000 registered users, huh (I registered by accident, did not understand Norwegian, sorry)...that said, what module are you using for the newsletter and how is it performing with volumes?

Again, what a site, congrats!

#3Submitted by quaoar on Mon, 10/13/2008 - 13:48.

Re: Re: Akademika AS

We'll list up the different modules we are using + whatever changes we did, as soon as the initial bug fixing sessions are over. Seems to me that even if you spend all the time in the world testing, a million bugs will still slip by and reveal themselves at launch Laughing out loud

The update script does around 10,000 products in about 5 minutes. I'm considering releasing this one, but I have to clean it up first and make it more user friendly - Python programming skill is required tho Smiling It makes it very easy to store nodes or products with CCK-based information (both singel and multivalue). Should be quite easy to have the script take input from CSV-/XML-files or other databases, map it to the right fields and have it update any kind of UberCart site.

The multipart checkout is based on skillful themeing and an "in house" module which we named "combined_addresses". This one needs clean up too.

We don't have 300,000 users..., yet. But quite a lot Smiling

The "main" computer, the one which serves the pages and host the site, is based on Dell PowerEdge 2900 III with 16GB memory and 15,000 rpm disks. Fast disks and lots of memory works wonders!

A funny thing: googlebot hit the site 10 minutes after it was released. The system has been reporting 1900-2000 concurrent users for the last 20 hours Sticking out tongue

Erlend Strømsvik
Ny Media AS
erlend@nymedia.no

#4Submitted by chrisbryant@dru... on Wed, 10/15/2008 - 15:08.

Thanks...

Thanks for the writeup and sharing technical details, it's quite impressive. Great job on the site! We know Drupal is tested and can scale and it's great to new see more info and projects with Ubercart also on a large scale.