Hundreds or thousands of posts in a structured channel?

Question

I'm looking to create a very simple website where a user can add items to their own personal feed over time. So by default it's date ordered, but you maintain the ability to sort the order a little bit if you want. So one day I might add a photo, the next day I add a video, the next day I add some text. All these items build up over time and it just gets bigger and bigger. Over the years you might end up with hundreds or thousands of items that you've added.

Matrix seems perfectly suited to something like this – where each item is a new block. Except for the fact that all of the items would need to live in a single entry. And I just can't see scaling that very big if everything is in one entry.

So the alternative would be to have each item live as a new post in a channel. This seems like it would make more sense, especially as you get into the hundreds or thousands of items. But then how would I maintain the ability to sort the entries? If I made the channel structured, would that be adequate? And would there not be any issues with having it scale to hundred or thousands of posts in a structured channel?

Basically I'm just trying to lay a firm foundation where I could theoretically have hundreds/thousands of users each with hundreds/thousands of posts.

Also, this is basically a vision for a web app that would have a front end interface on it. Is something like this pushing Craft past it's abilities for what it was designed for?

Answer 1

We've seen Craft installs running with several hundred thousands of users / assets / entries, etc.

But when you're getting into that range, there are several other things to take into account such as hardware resources and architectural designs, various caching methods (Varnish, memcached, Craft's template caching), etc.

Having said that, it makes more sense to me to have them as entries and if you need the ability to have them sortable, then a structured section is the ways to go.

But there is a known issue with the UI for structured sections in the control panel where it will bog down when you get into the thousands of entries range. We're addressing that for the upcoming Craft 2.2 release, so it shouldn't be a problem for long.